When I began making masks, I was unaware of their power. My first mask, made just for fun, surprised me by what it evoked. I pulled the plaster away and beheld an exact replica of me - a bare bones, plain white, tabula rasa of my face. I decoupaged it with photos of people I love, and although it satisfied me, it represented my outer life. Right away I knew I wanted to make others to represent my interior world.

As I made masks, the process began to change me. By making masks, I began unmasking. As I show my dark shadow selves, weaknesses, and fears as well as my personal strengths and joys, I shed the protection of tough old hide, like a snake shedding its old skin. Each mask bares a different part of me. I framed the masks in dresser drawers because they feel intimate as underwear. Each one is personal, yet they are also archetypes.

Often I am drawn to make a mask when I am feeling unsettled, yet when the mask is completed I usually feel resolution. For example, I made Tin Woman to represent that part of me that sometimes fails to assert myself and speak up when a situation warrants. I painted her jaw clamped shut and rusted from disuse, her eyes sad. And when she was completed, I knew I would find my voice.

The Door Through My Grief mask series enabled me to express what words never could after a violent death in my family. Painting my face as my heart, bruised and broken in half, helped start the long healing process. In the next stage of grief I felt as if I were totally numb to myself, to my emotions, to life. I felt as frozen as the survivors of the Titanic bobbing in the frigid North Atlantic waters. Making this frozen mask worked through some of the numbness, helped thaw me just a little. Then when the anger stage arrived, my fury poured out in the hellfire face.

As I embrace these archetypal parts of me, I edge toward living a more authentic life. Now I teach mask-making workshops so that others will discover the power of the masks to inform and transform.