background
This project has been an exploration of time and isolation through making. Since losing my job in the first COVID lockdown, I’ve been spending most of my working hours making reusable cloth masks to sell online. Having spent so much time designing, crafting, and marketing masks, they’ve become the central symbol of the pandemic to me. As a means of both exploring and documenting my personal experience throughout October’s 28 days of red-level lockdown measures, I’m making one mask each day, but focusing on the figure rather than the function. Each mask is representative in some way of the day’s mood, activities, or material exploration, and is labelled with three items that connect the context of the pandemic in Quebec to my experience as an individual existing within it: a single word that describes my day, the number of new cases reported in the province that day, and the number of deaths reported in the province that day.
process
Before starting the project, I gathered a collection of existing artists’ and fashion designers’ explorations in face masks and related forms to expand my own ideas of where the boundaries of “maskness” lie and to spark questions about how they might be navigated and/or challenged.
I began crafting on the first day of lockdown. Some masks take inspiration from how I felt that day (eg. wool reflecting my desire to curl up under a pile of sweaters on the first really chilly day of the fall), some take their materials directly from the day’s activities (eg. tomato skins saved from a batch of salsa I was preserving), and some simply came from curiosity about what how a material would behave in the shape of a mask (eg. white glue dried into a sheet because I wanted to see what would happen).
