Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Yoruba
19th-century
Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum
74%
Helmet Mask (Epa). Wood, iron nails and bands, fiber, sacrificial substances. Mid-late 19th century
What is most striking about this mask is the openness of its structure — it admits an extraordinary amount of negative space into itself. In fact, the whole thing could be said to be experienced as a sequence of balanced, nested empty cells. The diamond-shaped void that extends out and down from the figure's neck is offset by the simpler cell — almost a single plane or disc — implied by the extension of hair (I think it's hair?) down from the head's crest to the middle of the back. Through the figure this ponytail-form points at the semi-enclosed chunk of space out front, which falls away to wrap around the horse's throat and concentrate — with the density of, like, a dying star — underneath the whole horseman-horse apparatus and atop the head of the actual mask-part of the mask. The slit that represents the mask's mouth is open in an echo of the hyper-dense pocket of nothing just above it. If I knew anything about Yoruba culture I'd venture that there's some significance to the fact that the mouth, structurally, seems to be breathing in all the negative/positive spatial play that goes on above it and gives the object a dynamism that doesn't contradict its stillness. (2025)