Disclaimer: This is me sharing my personal tastes and my attitude to them. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I’m also not judging anyone who has different tastes and attitudes. Links to collection & social media are at the end of the post.
Accepting my own tastes took me quite a bit of time. I like classic and trashy pop stuff, deep and superficial, beautiful and ugly… Let me tell you a little more about it — and about the mask I made to express it.
As a kid, my tastes were mostly my parents tastes. There were obviously things I preferred, like favorite cartoons and books to read, but they still came from my parents, which is natural.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember much of this period and the particular things I liked. Even if they had some significant formative influence I have no idea what it was.
I do remember some of the music my parents listened: classic rock (my dad) and some Russian and foreign pop music (my mom). This combo to some degree is still a part of what I listen today. However, over the years I piled a lot more on top.
As a teen, I was very typical when it came to liking stuff: I didn’t like typically girly stuff (because, duh, other girls like it) and I wanted to be different from everyone else.
At some point, I took a notebook and wrote down a whole bunch of «things that make me different from everyone else». I totally did. Unfortunately, the notebook got lost — I would so very much like to read it and cringe, and maybe share a few choice points with you guys.
My most active period of self-exploration started in my late teens, when I entered the uni and started using the Internet (yes, I am that old). And I kind of began finding myself in my early twenties.
Bright hair colors, tattoos — all this and more came for me after the age of 23, not as a rebellion against my parents or some rules. It came as a part of me discovering myself.
The older I get the less often I thought/said «I don’t ever listen to/read/watch/eat/wear that». I had fewer and fewer guilty pleasures because no, I am not ashamed of liking Russian 90s pop music, enjoying reading Twilight and watching Riverdale, or wearing pink glittery sequined stuff. Why should I be?
Liking pop and «trashy» stuff doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy deep, meaningful, classical stuff. I also like stuff that doesn’t quite fit any of the two categories — well, the world is obviously not black and white, some stuff is neither trashy nor classic, some stuff is just … sorta neutral stuff, and some stuff is so experimental it barely fits any labels. I love it all, and more.
I don’t want to make another «things that make me different from everyone else» or show off my eclectic taste in stuff but as I am sharing, I want to share a couple of short stories.
My mom once asked me to recommend her a movie to watch. After she watched what I recommended she actually asked me to never recommend her stuff. First of all, it was kind of rude and hurtful. I mean, you don’t have to like what I recommended but asking to «never do that again» was a bit too much, I think.
Secondly, what do you think I recommended her? A weird art-house movie? Body horror? Experimental drama? Nope, it was just Amélie. Which is weird and not to everyone’s taste, I get it, but it sounded as if she was repulsed by it.
On another occasion, a guy friend was extremely surprised that I liked Rammstein (still do) and was excited about going to their concert. This says more about him than my tastes, though, as, according to him, he didn’t expect it from a girl.
As for people asking me «why do you even like this?» or «I didn’t think you’d like that» — I don’t even count those. If I had a penny for every one of those cases, lol.
I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m showing off. I wanted to share this part of myself, and here it is: I like a lot of stuff, trashy and classy, often stuff that usually doesn’t «go together» in people’s minds.
Now, onto the mask.
I’ll be honest, this one has no eyes because I forgot to cut them out. With most of the other ones the absence of eyes is a conscious choice for various reasons.
Like all the masks in the collection, it has a paper mache base (you can read about me making it here and here).
I then took a newspaper page, tore it up, dirtied it with some earth from a flowerpot, and glued it to the base. Getting dirty was kind of fun but took longer than I expected.
To represent trash a bit more, I took some of my embroidery cloth and thread scraps and glued them to the newspaper.
To make the «trash» gilded, I used golden acrylic paint, a few little golden flowers, and golden glitter. There is still golden glitter all over my apartment, and I’ll be probably be finding it in my stuff forever.
To add a bit more «classiness» to the whole thing, I put on long satin gloves for the photograph. I have no idea where I have them from whatsoever.
And this is, I guess, about it for the story of this mask — but feel free to ask questions, here or on Twitter.
Thank you for reading!
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