From Behind the Mask
From Behind the Mask is a social and artistic experiment and installation from Waterloo Region and the first official recipient of the Joy Experiments Award of Merit.
When the pandemic started, creator Brenda Reid was partway through their Master of Architecture program focused on community well-being. They became interested in the word ‘care’ and started to think about how an architect practices care for the public through work.
The idea for Behind the Mask came about in the summer of 2020. Brenda was spending time photographing the signs of support people made, while also analyzing quilts, which are artifacts of care. These two things clicked, and they decided to make a community quilt to tell and preserve the community’s coronavirus stories.
As Brenda describes it:
“Our community quilt is made up of individual quilt blocks, allowing people to create a small part of the quilt from the safety of their home. Each block is the shape and size of a face mask. Masks have become a symbol of our care and the means of separating ourselves from one another. From Behind the Mask gave people the opportunity to create double-sided quilt blocks that told a part of their pandemic story. The blocks are untraditional and tie together. The spaces between the blocks represent our space between each other. The ties that hold all the blocks together represent our essential social ties — the ties of a community.”
“The grounding idea for this quilt was for it to make space — physical space — for our stories of pain, resilience, and care. Everyone has had a unique experience of the pandemic within our community. This quilt-making project became a way for people to see themselves in a community-built architecture. My goal was to create this quilt to connect people to another’s perspective and lived experience, to validate our differences and similarities. Together, we’re building empathetic space for each other by assembling the quilt.”
Under Brenda’s leadership, over 550 stories were submitted and sewn together to create a 25-foot-long masterpiece.