My God Mask

My senior year in high school, we read the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The book was about the main character, Okonkwo, and his life and his part in his village in Nigeria. It was a very interesting story and I learned a lot about that culture from the perspective of Okonkwo. During at least one point in the story, they have a ritual in which they call upon the Gods they believe in for advice. I can't quite remember the specifics or the number of Gods, but it was somewhere around 7-10, and they were embodied in that number of men from the village. The men would wear masks and dance around for the other people in the village and the people knew that it would be only the men, but they would treat them as if they were the actual incarnations of the Gods. Their bodies were just a sort of vessel so that the Gods could get down to Earth and speak to the people.

I have not done much re-search on the aesthetics of the masks that would have been used, but I like the idea of becoming a God just by adorning a mask, so I think I would like to make a large clay mask that represents a God that I would like to believe in for my second project and it will be based on the ideas from Chinua Achebe's book. I am not a religious person, I do not go to church or worship any God, so I want my God to be a God of Nature. Nature and the environment I live in are important to me, so I will make a God for that so that it is personal to me. I remember when I was a small child, my Dad asked me one night while tucking me into bed, "What do you think God looks like?" My favorite movie of the time was The Little Mermaid, so my response was, "I think He must look like King Triton." I thought of what an all powerful man who created the world would look like, and King Triton was the most powerful man under the sea in that movie, and really all of the movies I had ever seen, and he had magical powers, so it was natural for me to think that is what God would be like also. I want to make my mask just a little bit larger than the size of a normal mask, and I want to make it out of clay. I will do some more research on non-western masks over the next week and post that later.


I got the image of King Triton from Google images.