Death Masks

Kate Tume had been making art about memorialising non-human losses for many years. Following the terminal diagnosis and subsequent death of her beloved husband Nicky in 2021, Tume was compelled to completely rearrange her art practice, mirroring the total rearrangement of her life. The idea of death masks, albeit for extinct species, had come to her several years earlier, but it was for this new deeply personal purpose that they have been successfully realised.

This series of 8 wearable sculptures create a pantheon of deities, each representing a facet of profound love lost, each a God of grief. Fascinated by the notion of Magical Objects, these are not just sculptures to be observed, but ritual objects to be worn, as humans have always done through millennia for such rites of passage. She sees these as tools for transformation; a room into which the wearer can go to become changed.

Not only concealing, but releasing, communing, becoming other, experiencing the otherness and othering of grief, and creating a sacred ritual object.

For Tume, they are also portraits – self- and of her husband.

Created using her own method, a hybrid of metal mesh and wire using stumpwork techniques, each mask is intended for wear and robustly made in cotton drill and felt before being heavily embellished, each bead and sequin individually sewn by hand. Using saturated colour and dripping with texture, Tume is a maximalist rejecting traditional western aesthetics of mourning. As one review observed, “not only does this work suggest making the unsaid and unshown visible, but making it ultra-visible”

This work is dedicated to Nicky Tume and our eternal love.

The Death Masks series will be exhibited for the first time from April 3rd - June 28th at Sunnybank Mills