I have been playing with the scraps of  sinamay that I have left from making my masks. They form coils and loops making them look like wisps of smoke.

The show set up has come round quicker then I anticipated, which is only an issue because I’m still having issues with presentation. However I know that I’m going to frame my faces with coils of sinamay, connecting some of the faces together.I don’t like this layout as it is too uniform. It doesn’t convey the raw edge that I want. This I feel works better as the two different blues are in the middle and they are not played out in rows.This is just an idea of what it could look like on the wall but I’m pretty happy with it as reference point. On the wall, I am over the moon with this final outcome. The extra sinamay frames and brakes up the faces whilst giving them a smoky quality. These are just a few of the emotions you could be feeling all at once.

Working out how Im going to present my “masks” In an exertion space has been by far the biggest issue on my mind. I just can’t seem to come up with a way to make them look good and command the room. I wanted to have enough to stick them together in a ball, faces looking out, like a many faced god, but sadly I don’t have enough to do that.

I know that it has got to look raw and maybe feel a bit like the expressions on the faces could change at any moment. I have to come up with some way to frame the faces to connect them to each other.

I have deside to embroider on my faces to add a bit of a punch to them, as on there own they don’t quiet convey as much emotion as I want.

Adding embroidery was not so much hard as it was time consuming. I feel like the time factor will be my biggest obstacle with this as it has been tacking me a day to embroider a face, on top of the two to three hours to make and twenty four to dry. Despite this I love the embroidered look.

The depth of the emotion between before and after is so much so that I feel Im going to do this with all my masks unless they convey enough emotion on there own.

I spent the week making samples of sinamay faces with expressions using wire and stitches. The wire expressions came out slightly simpler then the stitched ones but I could remover the wire easier. The main downfall of the wire hold was it made bigger holes in the sinamay then the stitches which isn’t aesthetically pleasing. The stitched faces can be more expressionate however the stitches are harder to remover and the expressions have a bigger risk of falling out while its drying.

The white face has a slightly smiling mouth and upturned eyebrows, where as the blue face that I did with wire I could only get a vague representation of eyebrows and not much else.

I have been finding it hard to catch pure moments where people pull the best faces.  I have asked models to pull expressions but they just come up weak in comparison. Unless I followed people through there day to day lives to capture those fleeting moments of un monitored expression, I won’t  have very strong expressionate photography. It was pointed out to me if I found a way to take away some of the elastic nature of the skin on peoples faces the expressions that are pulled would be more exaggerated. This made me think of when you wear a face mask that has dried and made your face feel all stiff. Purely on a creative whim I decided to experiment. I masked up a group of voluenteers and asked them to pull expressions, once the mask had dried. I could not have hoped for better results.This is just an example of my favourite expression. There is nowhere on this face that you can look endnote see anger and frustration, its just fabulous.

Up until this point the faces I have been making are expressionless. This is because my plaster moulds are expressionless as you cannot hold an expression when having your face modroced. First off I tried to pinch the sinamay into an expression before putting my bag of rice on top but the expressions worked there way out while drying and the ones that stayed I couldn’t get very complex because I only have two hands.  I need to come up with a way of fixing my expressions in place while it dries.

I spoke to the milliner again, about my problem of not having enough hands to hold the face in place while it dries. She told me that most milliners would use a wooden block that they could tack their hats onto while they dry. My face moulds are made out of plaster so I can’t nail into them. I thought about using polystyrene heads but they would be generic and not the faces of actual people, as my theme is identity I think that is important. So I’m going to have to wait them down some how. First I tried just waiting them around the edges but the face didn’t come out with much definition. So I have to use something that moulds to the contours of the face. I then started to try food substances like flour, rice and dried beans in plastic bags. I found that the rice gave the best results.

After failing at making a mask out of fabric I had to look elsewhere. I went to speak to the miliner in our fashion department to see what she would sugest. She said I should try forming them out of sinamay. Sinamay is a loose mesh material, a bit like tulle, coated in a water based varnish, when you get it wet you can mould it into different shapes. However I have only managed to create a face with multiple helpers to hold the different contours of the face in place while it dries. It takes about half an hour to stiffen enough to let it go for it to finish drying. I have to come up with a way I can hold them in place without help.

I have decided that my end result will look at emotional identity and how you can be feeling many conflicting emotions all at once.

I have decided that my major project is going to consist of masks. As of yet I haven’t come up with the best way to make these masks. I have plaster molds of three faces to make the masks on. So far I have made paper mâché masks to explore social media identity and how true it is.

Drawing inspiration from Aitor Throup’s constructed textile skulls I’v decided to try and make a constructed textile mask. To draw a pattern I first tried cutting out paper shapes an aligning them on the plaster head. However my results weren’t very good. Then I thought maybe I was going at it backwards. What if I made a mask and then cut it up to make the pattern?

I made a plain paper mâché mask, and then drew on it the sections that I thought would give me the best mask. Once I had cut these sections apart I just needed to add a seam allowance and cut them out of fabric.