Meet the visual artist and cultivator of the thread-face phenomenon, ThreadStories. 'It's questioning how the erosion of personal privacy in the digital age shapes how we view ourselves online. The masks deny the viewer the full story.'
began by chance in a way, I was making a mask to wear to a music festival something myself and my friends had always done. I had an idea for a mask that I wanted to make, but couldn’t figure out how to make it. I knew I wanted a soft mask that I could pull on and off easily. I knew how to crochet but had never made anything other than a blanket a couple of years prior for a friend, but I felt my way through the process of making a balaclava using crochet.
I have a degree in Fine Art Sculpture but had never engaged with textiles or any craft discipline to make work prior to this. My process is experimental, every time I photograph one of my masks I treat the photo like a sketch, I am striving to find as many different forms by repeating the same techniques. The techniques I employ are always the same, I crochet a balaclava, sometimes with space for features sometimes not.
In 2015 I began uploading masked selfies to Instagram and steadily threadstories grew. I would describe threadstories is a collection of manufactured facades that I frame in the format of selfies and short animated video clips. The masks are sometimes monstrous, other times farcical façades that poke at the performative nature social media cultivates and celebrates.
I was asked recently about the concealing and revealing nature of masks and I described it as a balancing act between concealing the wearer and revealing something about the wearer. In my experience people respond to the person behind the mask as much as the art form of the mask. When I make a mask with no visible or suggested facial features it often leaves the viewer cold, people still need to see the face in the mask.
I am currently asking questions in the studio that will hopefully propel the masks into these different arenas, off line but still exploring the same theme of the erosion of privacy in the digital age. Questions like, how are the images of our faces which we willingly share online, or that are harvested through CCTV in public spaces being used in the era of surveillance capitalism, a term popularized by social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff.
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