The inspiration behind this entirely paper mask derived partly from my long attraction to greek mythology, and the rest in the transformative delight of masks I made as a child. Violent, feminine, demonized- Medusa seemed an enjoyable choice for a project meshing the two.

"My gallant Perseus, tell me by what craft, what courage, you secured the snake-tressed head.' And Perseus told him of the place that lies, a stronghold safe below the mountain mass of icy Atlas; how at its approach twin sisters, the Graia, lived who shared a single eye, and how that eye by stealth and cunning, as it passed from twin to twin, his sly hand caught, and then through solitudes, remote and trackless, over rough hillsides of ruined woods he reached the Gorgones' lands, and everywhere in fields and by the road he saw the shapes of men and beasts, all changed to stone by glancing at Medusa's face. But he, he said, looked at her ghastly head reflected in the bright bronze of the shield in his left hand, and while deep sleep held fast Medusa and her snakes, he severed it clean from her neck; and from their mother's blood swift-flying Pegasus and his brother sprang." - Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.770