Lafayette, Louisiana · depuis 1998
Masks built the slow way — paper over a clay form, twenty-three carat leaf, and whatever the birds left behind. We make about ninety a year and then we stop.
31 commissions left this season
I · The collection
The Venetian shapes came over with the opera companies. The capuchon came out of a French farming village and got here by way of the prairie. We build all of them the same way.
Every mask is fitted to a photograph of the wearer's face and finished by hand. There is no such thing as a stock size and we will not pretend otherwise.
II · The Courir
Out on the prairie they do not throw beads. Masked riders go door to door and ask for an ingredient — an onion, a bag of rice, a live chicken you have to chase — and at the end of the day the whole village eats the gumbo.
The costume mocks the people who once had power over you: the pointed capuchon for the noblewoman's hennin, the mortarboard for the schoolteacher, the mitre for the priest. The screen wire mask hides you from your neighbours, which is the entire point.
III · The atelier
