community mask making

Whilst developing the exhibit ‘Cosecha de Rostros’ (Harvest of Faces) in January and February 2020, Huge Sillytoe facilitated mask-making sessions with all of the groups that make up the Huerto Roma Verde community garden where they were artist in residence at the time. The cleaning staff, the administration, the ceramics workshop, the kindergarten, the recycling centre, the gardeners, the textile workshop, the security, and other groups all sat down for a few hours each with Huge to stick, sew, and mould a new face for themselves whilst sharing stories of what brought them to form part of the Huerto community. The resulting exhibit included the masks themselves and snippets of the stories shared, alongside a mosaic of double portraits of each person with and without their mask on. In this way Huge and the participants in the project explored together a new visual-anthropological method for telling the interwoven tales of a community and representing each individual’s multifaceted contribution to the collective character of the group. This is a model that Huge is looking to develop further with other communities in the future.

Cosecha de Rostros, Huerto Roma Verde, Mexico City, March 2020

All the Masks of the Apple Tree, Makamik, Helsinki, August 2021

Lying beneath the crab apple tree that gifts the cultural centre Makamik its name, Huge Sillytoe orchestrated a collective reading of the shapes, shades, textures, and smells of the tree as a poem of sounds and movements. A selection of the creatures seen within the branches and expressed through the poem were then converted into masks made of materials reclaimed within the local area and an automatic happening-workshop held for each character to come to life. They have since been since causing trouble in apple trees all over the world.