Es Devlin Mask Concave Human Brain River Anatomy Award Postcard

POAP18*  This is a specialist modern postcard by Es Devlin called Mask and one of the most unique postcards I have offered which was the photo used to enter the annual Charity Awards at Charity London with details on reverse unused and mint.

An ovoid, mask-shaped concave form is sculpturally imprinted with dense urban geometry. A river divides the map like a mirror-distorted image of a human brain. A film is superimposed showing hands that peel at projected surfaces, mark up maps and mine through layers of paper, charcoal, clay, mirror, then wash their stains in ink until it clarifies to water. Rinse and repeat: the film plays on a loop: the layers excavated further with each revolution.

The work considers the range of scales of time and space that we simultaneously perceive and chose to remain blind to as we calibrate our position within the period that we now call the Anthropocene: when what we know about the environmental impact of each thing we touch will soon preclude us from touching anything in the same way again.

The hands are six times larger than life, scaled to match the out-sized, face-like form, like the hands of a giant, trying to find or draw the eyes on its own blind mask. The city is viewed as remote aerial cartography: geometry extruded from earth by un-remembered generations of distant 1:1500 scale hands. The two scales are held together, un-reconciled in the work.