The process started with the eerie sensation of having my face cast – feeling the plaster gypsum harden, wiggling my eyebrows and nose to get out of it and digging plaster dust out from my eyes and mouth. Guess I didn’t keep things shut well enough!
As I worked on the plain white face of me staring back, I tried to follow the workshop instructions – who am I? There wasn’t anything too coherent – turtles hiding inside their shells, vortexes in space, a really cool way of making a horn from cardboard.
I worked some more – always something to remember – don’t get discouraged with your creation until you’ve put a whole lot of hours into it – and added prairie wheat, a prism that will make lovely rainbows, a map with it’s own map pin, a boney finger and an animal nose. Finally I added a star ‘mole’ and some copper eyes.
What does it all mean? All these disparate elements that come together like ingredients in a cake, to make the ‘me’ I am. Difficult to pin an identity down, dangerous to pin a label, complicated to encapsulate in one image – we are really shape shifting through a mixing bowl of feelings, memories, reactions and potentialities.