Flight of Fancy 1024x1024 2x Back to Masks

Flight of Fancy

Materials used:

  • painted plaster cast of my face;
  • antelope skull and horns, Montana;
  • flat piece of scrap metal, Jefferson River, Montana;
  • sand gravel, Hawaii;
  • wasp honeycomb nest, Montana;
  • red ironized dirt, Moab, Utah;
  • small crab shell, Florida;
  • sand balls, Moab, Utah

(wall mount)

This Mask Artistry piece is entitled “Flight of Fancy.” The base is a skull and horn rack of a small pronghorn antelope and was gifted to me by a woman friend/hunter. The title of this piece refers to the speed of the antelope as it takes flight, running up to 60 mph, making it the fastest animal in the western hemisphere. It also has the ability to bound 20 feet into the air when running. This unique North American animal with a translated Latin name of “American goat-antelope,” is really neither a goat nor a true antelope. Beautiful in and of it self, is it is truly one of a kind.

I expand that flight/speed image and tap into another definition of “flight ” from the Webster Dictionary: “the passing (as of the imagination) beyond the ordinary limits.” Therefore, I named this “Flight of Fancy,” and honor those moments of capriciousness when we allow our imagination to go farther, faster, and more focused than before. We delve, perhaps into a dream state and touch the borders of fantasy or perception… and pass beyond those borders to an experience that expands our awareness and cultivates our creativity through a “flight of fancy.”

Decorations include a rusted old piece of scrap metal I found on a kayak trip on the Jefferson River last month, and a handful of what I call “sand gravel” from a Hawaiian beach. It is sand, but the grains resemble more of a gravel texture and size, rather than that of fine particles of broken hard rock or coral. From Moab, Utah, I gathered what I call “sand balls” from a crumbling shelf of hard sandstone soil. As the shelf crumbles and erodes, little balls of hard sand emerge, like marbles on the desert floor. I added a wasp honeycomb nest as part of the headdress, and a small crab shell I found in Florida over 20 years ago. The final touch is a sprinkling of red dirt from the iron-rich bright red layers of sedimentary rock and soil in Utah, visible now as erosion peels away geological eons of sedimentary layer stacking.