Lygia Clark. Máscaras sensoriais.

Six masks, six ways of sensing

In 1967 Lygia Clark made a set of six fabric masks. Each one pulls over the head like a hood, with a nose piece that extends forward. Inside the nose is a small pouch holding an herbal essence. At the eyes and ears Clark attached different objects to distort sight and sound.

According to Clark's official archive, each mask is named by its colour. The white mask has steel wool at eyes and ears and chamomile at the nose. The black has mirrors at the eyes and rosemary. The pumpkin mask has painted acetate at the eyes, a dried gourd tied with guitar string at the ears, and lemon balm. The blue has crumpled clear plastic at the eyes, shells at the ears, and mint.

The cherry mask has aluminium at the eyes, a sponge and an Ajax cap with a marble inside at the ears, and anise. The green has bandage at the eyes, pieces of glass at the ears, and lavender.

Reading the list is like reading a recipe. Each mask is its own combination of what one sees, hears and smells. No two are alike. Someone in the white mask and someone in the black one enter two different worlds, even standing side by side in the same room.

From the painting to the body

Lygia Clark was born in Brazil in 1920. She began as a geometric abstract painter, then became one of the founders of the Neo Concrete group in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s. The group wanted the work to leave the flat plane, step into space, and reach the viewer.

Clark went further than most of her peers. From hinged metal pieces folded by hand she moved to Caminhando in 1963, in which the participant cuts a Möbius strip of paper. Then to things worn on the body: Sensorial Gloves in 1966, Breathe With Me the same year, The I and the You in 1967. Her archive places the Sensorial Masks among the Sensorial Objects, in the period she called non art.

That name states the intent. The work is no longer something to hang and admire. It is complete only when a body puts it on. Without a wearer, the mask is a fabric bag with a long nose, slightly comic, lying on a table.

In the same period Clark's close friend Hélio Oiticica built fabric tents for visitors to enter barefoot, in Tropicália. Both left the painting behind, each in a different direction: Oiticica widened the room, Clark shrank it to a hood.

Between belonging and isolation

Clark's archive describes the sensations of wearing a mask as ranging from integration with the surrounding world to a turning inward that reaches complete isolation. Both ends sit inside one mask.

Smell plays a particular role. With the eyes covered and the ears disturbed, smell is the only sense that still arrives directly, unfiltered. It ties the wearer to a real plant, something grown in a garden, while everything else is distorted. It also makes the wearer aware of their own breath, of the small space between face and cloth.

The six smells Clark chose all belong to the kitchen and the garden: chamomile, rosemary, lemon balm, mint, anise, lavender. Nothing rare, nothing costly. But held close to the nose in the dark, a familiar smell grows many times louder.

More than fifty years later the masks are in museums, and in 2014 they appeared in the Lygia Clark retrospective at MoMA in New York. Behind glass they cannot be worn. Visitors can only look. That paradox may be the clearest reminder of what Clark wanted: her work is not in the fabric but in the head that was once inside it.