Shelter Project

The word shelter can mean so many different things, to many different people. Our interpretation of any word is effected by out environment; our culture and heritage; our religion; politics; family and the people and the things that we interact with on daily basis, from the moment that we are born.


During our initial group discussion, a huge range of ideas came out including the following:

The Womb / Mothers Arms / Family

Constructed Shelters – A House / Caravan / Tent

Objects of purpose – An Umbrella / Hat/ Coat

Musical association – The Rolling stones “Gimme Shelter”

Your own skin / Your mind / Persona

Make up (Cosmetics) / Masks

After throwing out so many ideas we all appeared to talk about the ‘shelter’ we create within ourselves and the face that we present to the rest of the world. We agreed that generally speaking we create a persona for the environment that we are in and the people that we are with.

This persona is comparable to a mask, as it is not the real you! It is not usual in your day to day life to openly show how you feel about what is happening in your life; there tends be relatively few people that we feel safe doing that with, usually those that we are closest to.

Too create a physical representation of these personas we looked at how masks were used around the world. Theatre was an obvious area and in particular I looked at the Japanese Noh masks. There a fixed number of Noh masks used in Japanese theatre, used to represent characters in various stories and lighting and head position is used to show the different moods.

Idea

To film a day in the life of a character, from the start of the day through everyday activities, showing how a physical choice is made regarding the face that is shown to the world and affected by the things that we experience.

A simple paper mache mask