Thoughts in Action

How much do you think you know your colleagues?

Your neighbours?

And your friends?

How much do you think you know yourself?

Many of us somewhat get lost in society’s infinite maze.

Where corridors are so long that it can take years before we see their dead ends.

Social mask

  • Social mask, series Thoughts in Action
    Acrylic and acrylic markers on canvas
    90 x 90 cm
    May 2022

  • Real size print on white paper
    90 x 90 cm
    Printed on demand

    AUD 115

  • A6 format print 10.50 x 14.80 cm
    Print on white paper 300 g/m2
    1 print weight 4.66g

    7 AUD

Teens may offer us our first social mask. It may be arrogant or shiny, provoking, mean, funny or victim. We may try many masks, borrowing some from friends until we find a collection that best fit to our personality. Progressively hiding ourselves behind a smoother version of who we are. Perfecting our traits, tuning our language, building our posture. A version that we think will attract us love, appreciation, recognition, valorisation. There are so many people in our little world to please. These boys or girls we’d like to seduce. These friends we’d like to hang more around with. Maybe our parents, who may have high expectations for us. A brother our sister who doesn’t even look at us. Or some teachers we’d like to get attention from.

By the time we enter a corporate world, or start making a living of any form, some of us have been so used to wearing these masks that they become second nature. Smiley. Polite. Pleasing. Smart. Listening. Compassionate. Lecturing. Empathetic. Proud. Funny. Attentive. They become the best projection of ourselves to others. Or we think so. We sometimes even forget to remove them at night. Their edges start merging into our skin, our hair, our mind. Fake it and you’ll make it. We become what we try to be. What we think we are. What we see of ourselves in others’ eyes.

And one day, for any and many possible reasons, we start removing one of the many social layers that has covered us over years. One at a time. Veils fall one after the other on the theatre of life. Every new one looks like if it was the last. Until we find another one behind. Our life becomes a quest to uncover our identity. To get to know ourselves in depths. Day after years, we reveal a bit more of or true face to ourselves, and to the world. Somewhat this face we find ourselves in is the same innocent face that was ours before we had put on our first social mask. It may be the same but it feels different. Because we know what is truly behind. This make it is deeper. Truer. Wiser. We can only guess how far one has been in their quest of self from the detphs of their eyes.

It may take us a life time to become who we had always been but not lived by.