Primary materials: Cardboard, glue, plywood, metal pipe, wooden dowel, newspaper, aluminum foil, tape, acrylic paint, spar urethane.
For a while I’ve thought it would be cool to make a mask stand that’s also a sculpture. The cardboard Titan mask seemed like a good candidate for such a stand, so I decided to give it a shot.
Early on I got the idea that if I made the top of this removable, that would allow me to adjust how the mask fits on the stand more easily, because I could swap out tops of different shapes and heights. Figuring out how to do this lead to a much more involved engineering project than would otherwise be the case. But in the end I made a neat little rotating joint that works the way I wanted it to.
The overall design started off looking like an octopus-type thing wrapped around a metal pipe, with three bifurcating tentacles that formed the base of the stand. For structural reasons I ended up putting a circular wooden base under the tentacles, and my various design choices overwrote the octopus elements.
Much like an un-filmable novel, another thing you can’t see here is that the base looks like a stylized bio-hazard symbol.
I constrained myself to using only red and black paint to match the mask. Painting this wasn’t particularly hard, but there was just a lot to do because of all the ridges and features.
If I had made this to be exclusively a sculpture I would have made some different design choices. But I think the constraints actually added to the alien nature of the final look, because the proportions and shapes are dictated to some degree by function rather than pure taste, so it made me go in a more unusual direction.
