cults, etc. As irrational as some of the beliefs behind these processions might seem, they are still organised and have some kind of historical tradition to tie them down. But, how do you explain someone who checks their door handle 200 times before going to bed… and how do you explain the person trying to sleep across the road from her, counting how many time she checks the door handle? There is a weird magic in the things that people do every day, under their own steam, which cannot be simply drummed up in the imagination. I love the drawings of beggars by either Bosch or Bruegel to inform their outlandish paintings of Hell – they had to go into the everyday market square and observe the life around them with a keen eye in order to get to the monsters in their works. I have spent much of my life so far drawing from observation and, through this practice, I have developed a knack for noticing the often esoteric, strange and ridiculous nature of people and places. SP: Like organised or religious carnivals there is also a constant movement – a presence/ absence succession to the everyday carnival on the street – bringing us back to ghosts. I heard Damon Albarn talking on the radio recently about living on the Notting Hill Carnival’s main route; the brilliant mayhem; and the ‘ghosts’ – spiritual reverberations – left behind the next day, when the street’s been cleaned up and things are back to normal. This got me thinking about the Hispanic Day of the Dead carnival and the paraphernalia that surrounds it, including masks. You’ve recently been travelling a lot, namely to South America, is this where your interest in mask making began? JG: Actually the masks grew out of my fascination with Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) and Cubism, which led me into African art and other ritualistic artefacts around the world. After drawing all day in the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin, in 2014, I found a Dan mask from Liberia in a boot sale. The Dan people make small passport masks, which travel with their owners as a form of identification. This led me to think about masks that travel the world and the different histories that one mask might have from another from the same location.
I made 14 copies of the Dan mask in ceramic and decided that the series would incorporate its travels before it came to me (Liberia and Berlin) and my travels during their period of making (Berlin, Quito, Santiago, Easter Island, Amsterdam, Venice, Cardiff and the Rhondda). The series also embodies my attempt at putting Wales and the UK on the mask-making map, along with other places of great mask-making traditions, which is why I called the series The World Masks of The Rhondda. SP: There’s something in the repetitive cast form of your masks, with their vibrant and varied ornamentation, which brings my mind back to Stroud Green Road. Pak’s Wig World has a shop-front that never ceases to entertain me as I pass it. I feel like there should be a Pak’s artist residency someday. You must have passed it most days. Has this store seeped into your imagination do you think? JG: Pak’s Wig World… ha ha… for sure, Pak’s Wig World is a ‘world’ made up of about five shops on either side of Stroud Green Road. It’s a green-fronted set of shops, with windows filled with faceless heads, sporting wigs of all colours. That end of the road is a real visual hit. Funnily enough, it was one of the things that made me want to live there. These are the strange things I notice that others often take for granted; every day we might pass a building full of unstaring heads with colourful wigs on and not bat an eyelid. There is something of the uncanny in the repetitive nature of the display, for sure, coupled with the fact that it’s made from faceless mannequin heads and wigs – things the Surrealists would often incorporate into their work to give it the strange feeling you get from some de Chirico and Magritte paintings, or a Hans Bellemer sculpture. That scene in Return to Oz, in which Dorothy finds the witch’s room full of rows of glass cases
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filled with sleeping heads, filled me with dread when I first saw it. The repetitive nature of these kinds of things has impacted on the way I work. Whether I’m making masks, paintings, collages or whatever, I often work in series – the more variations I can make on a single subject, the more knowledge I gain on that subject. Working in a series means that you are working in chunks that make up a whole through time, allowing for periods of research and life experience in between one chunk of work and the next. For example, I have recently begun painting heads and faces with mouth masks (small masks worn around the mouth by Nazca leaders) – the first painting stays quite close to the original Nazca art I was inspired by. However, the second painting is already swaying between Nazca forms and those found in contemporary Western life, like lumberjack textile patterns, or colour combinations that may have stayed with me while walking past Pak’s Wig World.
It was then that I left James alone to finish his daily work on card. It was late and the ambience of the light, coupled with the catharsis of his work, was making him feel progressively drowsy and forcing his posture to decay. Yet another pile of cards collapsed over the rug, revealing one that James had not seen in a matter of years, made most probably during his days living above Woody’s ten years before. He picks it up; its position within the deck had preserved it completely. It’s a collage depicting a bright yellow W hovering over a galactic horizon, like a bat signal. With a deep exhale he murmurs quietly to himself; “The Shaolin and the Wu-Tang could be dangerous... do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?”—CCQ