AboutFace is the result of conversations that occurred on the artisan at home Facebook group in March/April 2020. It takes as its departure, the highly evocative symbol of COVID-19, the face mask. In these extraordinary times, the iconic image of the surgical mask has emerged as a symbol for COVID-19 and the era of social distancing.
To document this, artisan invited the making community to make, remodel, rework, embellish and decorate the simple home-made surgical mask as a creative reflection of the current global experience.
Selected masks now form an online exhibition and also a window exhibition. The AboutFace exhibitions together showcases 64 artists and 104 artworks from Australia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Italy, Poland, South Africa and the UK.
In acknowledgement of the indiscriminate nature of this crisis, to make this a level playing field, the works are displayed anonymously. Individual masks are only identifiable by the title of the work. All the contributing artist's names are listed separately, alphabetically.