Photo by Franciska Stone

By Franciska Stone | Herald Contributor

Students in the Foundations of Sculpture class have kicked off the school year with an interesting topic; using only trash and recyclable materials, their objective was to create a headpiece revealing a part of their personality that others cannot easily see.

For Sofia Pipa, an international student majoring in fine arts, making a mask meant revealing a change she’s made since freshman year in her Greek high school.

Pipa sat outside, twisting the wires in the beginning stages of her mask.

“My introverted side is shown on the left,” she said of the end product. “The eyes, nose, and mouth I’ve created from wire are detailed, and they cover my features—almost concealing what is really there.”

Pipa explained the feeling of keeping to herself and demonstrated how the left side of her mask, which expands to her ear, depicts the “closed box” she kept herself in.

By consciously coloring the left side of the mask a dark blue and the right side pink, yellow, and red, Pipa is able to portray the transformation from light to dark, from withdrawn to outgoing.

“That’s my extraverted side,” she said of the colorful side of the mask. “I’ve changed a lot.”

To finish up the mask, Pipa added a touch of style at the top: a wire protruding at the top of the mask, wrapping around her head and sticking upward in an eccentric manner. Sofia calls it her creative, complex side.

“I didn’t shape the material,” she said, laughing. “The material made me shape it that way.”

Freshman Kira Goodale chose to create a helmet from a bunch of different materials. A headband she’d meant to discard years ago became the base of her work. Using a mannequin to expand the helmet, she found herself connecting a variety of different materials, like dryer sheets and a ballet skirt. An interesting piece of the mask is her grandmother’s brooch, which is fastened to the ballet skirt veil in front of her left eye.

“It made me think of my mind, which is spinning constantly,” Goodale said.

Every little piece of Goodale’s hat has a meaning.

“I wanted to represent a shattered view of myself with these pieces of glass,” she said of the ocean-blue shards glued to a triangle of cardboard.

The toilet paper roll on top of the mask is particularly noticeable; Goodale found a sticker with the words “Fragile, Handle with Care” and fixed it

to the cylinder.

“The ‘Fragile’ represents a part of me that is sensitive,” Goodale said. “It’s like a message to me, to ‘handle myself with care.’”