Máscaras

Owl Priestess

This mask is inspired by the Búho Da Chi of the Hongshan culture (4700–2900 BCE), one of China’s most ancient civilizations, organized around ritual specialists and shamanic practices rather than warfare or wealth. Their jade artifacts, carved using bamboo and string-saw techniques, achieved a level of abstraction that feels strikingly contemporary. The owl was a central figure in their cosmology of spirit worship; the specific source here is the “hooked-cloud” object, a jade owl deity. The Sacerdotisa—the Priestess—reinterprets that ancestral form through my own sculptural approach, rendering the owl as a ceremonial figure: the keeper of ritual, the one who stands at the threshold between worlds. Acoustically, the mask houses two whistles that produce the owl’s call and acoustic beating, alongside a duct flute tuned to the ancient Chinese pentatonic scale: Gong, Shang, Jue, Zhi, Yu. Fitting this tonal system into the mask’s abstracted form required extensive acoustic research—a process that deepened the work’s connection to the tradition it references.

Year

2026

Type

Sonic mask

Materials

Saggar clay, metallic glazes

Technique

Slab and pinching; advanced bevel-and-window system

Firing

Electric kiln, 1250 °C

Dimensions

40 × 28 × 17 cm

Location

China