The Hidden Face

Background

I am Spider. I am an artist and I make masks from leather and other materials.

this page contains nude imagery of an artistic nature.

When I was a child, I would play alone a lot. There were many empty places that I would explore.  My father worked on machines, so there was a junkyard, a big graveyard of derelict vehicles and engines, behind our house. The junkyard tapered off and blended into a wooded area that I never once saw a live animal in, save for a large, black dog that met me on a path late one night. The junk and derelicts would become overgrown with creepers and strangler figs, and over time the man-made and the organic would fuse.  My favorite place to explore was a huge earth-mover, deep in the woods, that a strangler had half-pulled down into the ground as it grew up through it.

​Now I’m grown and I miss those places very badly. I left home, thinking that I was lonely and I needed people and I needed new places and that I needed to get away from my father, because I thought I hated him. But when I left I carried those old machines and that empty forest around with me, and they brought me a great deal of comfort. The new places and the new people never brought me happiness like playing alone out there in the dark, and I missed my father very badly, though I still wouldn’t admit that.

​Whenever I make art, whether it’s a sculpture or a drawing or anything at all, that blending of the organic and the artificial is always present. I always made art but loved science, and as I grew up I learned about concepts like futurism and Transhumanism, which is the idea that people have stopped their own evolution but have made a world that constantly evolves, and to cope with this we have to evolve artificially to better fit into our new and protean environment. We already live in a world where people carry pacemakers in their chests, and wire buttons to their brains to calm migraines, but someday we will have gone much farther. The air we’re breathing is almost always contaminated, our water has strange chemicals pumped into it for no good reason, and much of our food isn’t made of anything we can actually digest. Someday, we will have to do something to help us cope with all of that. People are afraid of genetic tampering, but they’ll shoot lasers into their eyes to see better, or staple their stomachs, or get breast implants. Little by little, we’re becoming more okay with being less human. Someday, we’ll be okay with not being human at all. I try to make what that will look like.