Primary materials: Cloth, glue, metal mesh, tape, acrylic paint, metallic wax, feathers, ribbon, rhinestones.
Around 2007 I put a cereal box on my head and had the idea of making an extra-tall hat/mask sort of thing out of it. I bought a few bags of feathers for this project but didn’t end up using any. They sat in a drawer for ten years.
While cleaning the drawer out I rediscovered the feathers and I wanted to finally make something with them.
The two big red feathers are held on by magnets. The original idea here was that if the feathers got broken I could replace them easily instead of having to chisel away glue and repaint anything. It turned out to be a useful feature for storing the mask, too, because now I can just turn the feathers down and cut the mask’s height in half, or take them off completely.
Before I started, I thought that gluing on the feathers was going to be a really slow process. They were actually one of the fastest steps. Painting, applying the rhinestones–there are about 180–and making the straps all took longer. The small feathers are also stronger than I expected. After gluing them on I handled this for several hours building other parts of it and none of the feathers fell off.