Gillian Wearing and Cahun

The funny thing about doing an art course and especially a contemporary art course is that ideas change quite a lot. My initial ideas of using nail art and embroidery have now moved on to masks. 

We all wear masks, metaphorically speaking and I know I have many. So do masks ever reveal more than they conceal or is the wearing masking something or is the viewer's perception provoked by the mask wearer??

Do we ever feel comfortable wearing a mask or uncomfortable? 

I looked into a some artists for some inspiration. 

The first was Claude Cahuh, who created small self portraits of her dressed as different people and genders. From a boy sitting on a beach to her own father, she embraced her gender fluidly.

This made me think a lot about masks, as she looks confident in her nakedness, is this because she is wearing a mask, would she have done this shot if she wasn't wearing something over her face?

Another artist that I associate with masks is Gillian Wearing, most of her practise is mask based, taken on the identities of herself, when she was younger, her Mother, father, uncle, brother and her masks become carefully reconstructed snapshots.

She was greatly inspired by Cahun and carried on where Cahun sadly left off. 

She even created lifelike prosthetic masks of her fellow artistic family, photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus and even Cahun herself.