Masks, Literally (Jennifer R. Hubbard)

I met my friend Carrie at a high-school arts camp. We were both in the creative-writing track at the time. The camp was short in duration but had a life-changing effect on me; it was the first place I’d felt that I fully belonged.

I kept in touch with Carrie and several other campmates for a while, but then we all got involved in our lives and drifted out of touch. A few years ago, however, I became curious about some old friends and looked them up online. (In the time since we’d all been in camp together, the Magic of the Internet had happened!)

I discovered Carrie living happily with her family, and working in an art field I hadn’t considered: mask-making. As she says on her blog: “I make masks. Because art is more fun when you put it on your head.”

These are not the flimsy, cheap Halloween masks that are held on with a stapled piece of elastic. They’re elaborate works of art, painstakingly crafted.

Her blog and Facebook show all the work that goes on behind the scenes, and her gallery shows the finished work. Her work has even made an appearance on the TV show CSI:
 The CSI Mask Experience

While I realize that we here at YAOTL didn’t have to take our “mask” topic so literally, I seriously thought that nothing I could write about masks would be as interesting as Carrie’s work and her own thoughts on masks, as chronicled on her sites. And it’s fun, as a writer, to delve into other fields of art from time to time, to see what our colleagues are doing with other media.