Enne Tesse was our featured artist for November 29-December 5, 2020. In this interview she discusses her work in greater depth.

We will feature a new artist of the Babelmasks Ad-Hoc Collective each week.

10 QUESTIONS

1)    Earlier (2018-19) you produced and exhibited two series of masks that are eerily prescient of the need for masks every day in 2020. In the first series, “Twelve Angry Masks,” these possess a sere allure: as much as they intend to erase and hide, they project a strong personality that draws the visitor closer. What response did you aim to elicit from these simultaneously blank and compelling visages? While the fast read takes the viewer to the opening gambit of “white hood,” this almost instantly dissolves to a closer read of the fine points of design that suggest something else has dictated the color and texture and the embellishments of the hand-sewn work.

To pull a viewer beyond an automatic first read into a more attentive consideration is difficult to accomplish when working with the semiotics of masks, especially white masks. How do you see the nature of the interaction as it progresses from first glance to deeper reflection between the mask and the viewer?

First off, I have been an artist for about 40 years. In 1999, I was fortunate enough to be included in a museum exhibition entitled “Visions of the Body: Fashion or Invisible Corset” curated by Shinji Kohmoto in Japan. My non-wearable objects series started before this exhibition around 1998. To make these works I chose to use untreated cotton canvas as a neutral material instead of a fabric with colors, textures and patterns. Cotton canvas has been a basic material for painters for a long time at least since the 50’s Abstract Expressionists in the U.S. Both “Twelve Angry Masks” and “Replacements” consist of sets of hand-sewn fabric face masks installed in a line across the wall. These works were produced by the following thoughts. In a not-so-distant future, preserving anonymity will be essential to in-person human interaction. According to rules set down by law, it will be obligatory to wear face masks during decision-making events when all individuals will be required to act anonymously as peers. Presented in these works are face masks each with a distinct expression covering the entire face and meeting minimum required guidelines set by law. Our dilemma will lie in choosing which mask to wear. The masks will not only conceal our true facial traits allowing us to remain anonymous but also, through distinguishable characteristics, permit us to express our individualities. I have no expectations as to how the viewer will react to my work. Thinking about a certain reaction that may or may not happen will not help my creative process. My choice of untreated cotton canvas, a common art supply material, is purely to eliminate the input of excess visual and sensual information that additional colors, textures and particular designer fabrics would allow. I wanted the work to remain somewhat minimal and neutral so the viewer could observe the details of how the masks were constructed.

2) The other collection of masks is closer still in time to the advent of the pandemic and appears to be an evolution of the previous society of “Twelve Angry Masks,” especially by its title “Replacements.” What is the story of the people who might wear or might have worn these more colorful and gleaming masks?

Actually, both works were made around the same time. While “Twelve Angry Masks” focuses on the construction of the mask using untreated canvas with distinctions between each mask created by adding and subtracting shapes of cut fabric sewn onto the masks, in “Replacements” I wanted to see the fabric covered with painted multiple colors and textures as an additional layer of concealment, which consequently becomes identifiable.

3) Much of your garment work takes inspiration from the natural world, as for example “Bird” and “Zigra”. These designs possess the lushness of couture work via design while hewing to the simplest of materials - muslins and linens and hemp  - and the minimalist and utilitarian components such as bookbinder thread and zip ties. The effect is of a ghostly extravagance, as though we have found something that drifted through the airlock from unimaginable millennia past, or from the hermetically sealed chambers of an ancient palace just unearthed. The drabness also indicates the dignity and exquisite delicacy of the natural fur, scales, or feathers of wild creatures right here. The interplay between the coarse and the luxurious and the natural and the conceptual yield highly original works which seem to operate on the primal instinct of the viewer rather than their socialized expectations of garment. What stories do you attach to garments like “Bird” and “Zigra”? My own reactions notwithstanding, what core shaping principles directed the contrasts of couture/nominal and natural adaptation/high-concept design? How do elements of time and culture direct these designs?

I am fascinated by early Japanese monster movies of the 1960s and the costumes made for the various monsters. I draw inspiration from this. The monster Zigra, from which the title of the work derives, is a cross between a goblin shark and a bird and its strength is all based around the blades on its back and fins. It possesses great speed and agility underwater but is virtually helpless on land. Its secondary pair of pectoral fins can grow to become a pair of appendages for land so it can stand up like a biped animal. My work “Bird” pays tribute to my mother's fear of birds by offering the power of feathers and wings. It is important to note that my works are not wearable garments. They are meant to exist on a female dress form, which is a found object representing a given idealized form that approximates reality.  

4)   You have done intriguing wall-based work such as “Passage” and “Capture” that seem to allude to fairy tales and legends and appear as pages torn straight out of some forgotten myth or folk tale. Do you attach narratives of your own to works such as these – garments that adorn mythical characters but could not practically or easily be worn by a person?

“Capture” was inspired by Giambattista Basile’s 17th century fairy tale entitled Petrosinella, a predecessor of Rapunzel. In this large wall work cotton drop cloth straps are sewn together to form a giant gowned figure. The figure reaches down towards the viewer by way of polypropylene rope strands. In the belly the figure carries a crocheted green wool yarn bag containing more polypropylene rope. “Passage” focuses on my immigrant journey from birth culture to newly acquired culture. The intersecting tubes of wool yarn represent segments of time that capture interruptions, reversals, pauses and halts of my immigrant journey. Interlocked within the trajectory of the journey are fear of the unknown, uncertainty of the voyage, obstacles, struggles, frustration, anxiety, numbness, denial of origin but also achievements, triumphs, accomplishments and victories. Both works were born afteseeing 11th and 12th century medieval garments made with coarse-textured fabric woven from roots of plants, goat hair, single-ply wool, linen and sackcloth. I agree, these works are not easily wearable but each of us do wear and carry our own past along with us everyday.

5) Many of your works rely on the close participation of the hands and fingers with strong presence of knotwork and hand-sewing as well as semiotic references to hand work that reside in twisted nylon ropes and nets – things that put the notion of handwork in mind. How did this particular practice develop?

I come from a generation of tailors and seamstresses. My childhood was spent in my family’s tailoring shop in Naples, Italy observing the selection of fabric cut and shaped into garments custom made to fit very specific bodies. I remember the look, touch and smell of stored fabric and shapes of sewing patterns hanging on the walls. The tailoring shop was filled with fragments of garments waiting to be sewn together. Slow-moving processes that require time to produce results such as hand sewing fascinate me. This includes the creation of handmade fabric by knotting and crocheting, which represents continuation, interruption and therefore quantities of accumulation of time.

6) Several of your works reinterpret the biology of the human form, particularly of the feminine form, and there are strategic decisions that hint at humor or even “in-jokes” about the relationship between the individual and her clothes, most notably “She wore one hundred pockets” and “she wore bandages.” I have my own sense of what these structures are meant to elicit, but I wonder if you can share something of your sense of a woman’s relationship to society and to herself, with clothes as the projection screen, the interpreting shape, or the medium of communication. Were these the ideas that helped shaped these particular works, or were there other ideas in mind that you aimed to communicate with these works?

Both of these works use the female dress form as their underlying structure and focus on the concept of dress relative to the female body form, its size and its transformation. “She Wore One Hundred Pockets” stands for memory as a random sequence of past and present concepts that can be stored and retrieved. Each pocket is numbered, of a different size and placed out of sequence just like the memories a woman may decide to carry, store and keep. “She Wore Bandages” investigates the concepts of real and imaginary; past and present; animal and human; strength and vulnerability. A woman wraps bandages around a wound, the bandages become clothes and help her to transform into an imaginary being. A woman is often the keeper of memories and the healer of wounds.

7) “Whisperer,” the work you submitted for the show, was very much a page in your personal lexicon, with the elegance of the design and the exquisite sensibility resting in the construction forming a delicate metamorphosis of the head and face. In the interim between the first exhibition of the “Replacements” masks and the creation of this mask in response to COVID- 19, how did your sense of forming this mask’s shape evolve?

“Whisperer” was made with the intention that it had to be worn. As I mentioned earlier this is not at all the case in my work. The utilitarian aspect of creating this mask was challenging. I believe that “Whisperer” exists somewhere in limbo between wearable and non-wearable. I enjoy watching Whisperer’s ambiguous transformations when it is not being worn.

8) Which historical influences of costume and clothing design have impacted you most profoundly? Are there certain designers or fashion movements that hold particular fascination for you?

Primarily, early medieval tunics, gowns and robes and their coarse materials such as plainly woven sackcloth, linen and wool. I remain very moved by the size and numerous patches I saw of the tunics said to have been worn by Saint Francis and Saint Clare found in the Basilica San Francesco d’Assisi.

9) Who were your earliest teachers or mentors and what advice or instruction did they give, what wisdom did they pass on or what example did they set that brought you closer to your own voice as an artist?

The community of people working in the tailoring shop influenced me the most: their stories of tradition, their attention to detail, the respect for their craft, their awareness of body morphology and their dedication to handwork.

10) When teaching young designers, what are the three things you would want to let them know that might help them understand the work they are undertaking and the core principles that helped you
the most?

Find what you love most. Then, listen, observe, create.