Lavinia Ewan

I am a cheat. My chosen tool for this false replication is the face. I want to take that which is truly unique and create fraudulent doubles for my own gain. No my work is not original, as I did not make that initial template, the mould from which my pieces are sculpted. However it is in these duplicates that the backbone of my work is based, the gothic fiction and fascinations with our doubles and their harbingering of our death. This abject subject motivates me to make death masks of the living, so now we can look upon our deceased self and invoke a hair raising sense of the uncanny.

Clichés aside, I thoroughly enjoy creative processes in which I can have a hands on approach and the use of mod-roc and clay face casts allowed me to get really stuck in and be very in control of the outcomes of my pieces. The pairing of the masks was not intentional at first, but once I realised they seemed to have more a presence with a partner I became more interested in the overall presentation of masks and their display as a whole. The relationships between the masks in each set are completely true and are a reflection of the former owner of the face. The background stories are fiction and were meant as a bit of tongue in cheek criticism to our stuffy museum archetypes, so I hope you enjoy these slightly more scandalous scripts.

http://laviniae101.tumblr.com/