Light Mask is a photographic series that explores photography’s complex relationship to life and death. I use the tradition of death masks to explore this complex dualism. Death masks were used before the advent of photography to preserve likenesses. Death masks and photographs are physically linked to their subjects: the death mask by a physical mold and the photograph by light and shadow. Both have a similar indexicality.
When creating Light Mask, I asked, what happens when what was never alive is photographed? I photographed a sculpture as if it had been alive, using my camera to breathe life into an object. Light Mask is a multifold re-animation. I made 3D-prints of a scanned fifteenth-century reliquary bust. Then, I took a ‘life’–mask of the printed reliquary’s face in a translucent clay. Instead of pouring plaster into the clay mold, I poured light through it. I took a photograph at the moment the light filled the negative space. The light became a mask, the positive cast. Here, the photograph captures the moment of enlivening: instead of sealing death, it seals a moment of re-animation.
Reliquaries complicate the dichotomy between life and death. Relics were body parts of deceased saints venerated for their holiness. Reliquary busts, often modeled after the saint from whom the relic was taken, served as protectors of the relic as well as a mode of identification and display. The reliquary directs believers to a life beyond our earthly existence.6 Reliquaries are vessels for potential re- animation.
In my Light Mask photographs, wax-like clay is illuminated. As light is projected through the imprinted surface, it gives the visual impression of being burned. It is as if the waxen impression might harden into an amber, preserving the subject’s face for eons like an insect or an ancient flower. Photography triggers wax’s alchemic transformation from a perishable surrogate for skin, death, and body to a glowing, immutable amber. The death mask’s preserved paralysis becomes a site of new life.
