“The iron is like a branding iron, and its symbol, or its brand, is like a tribal mark on the person or object that's branded by it.”
—Willie Cole
Man Spirit Mask continues Cole’s deployment of the steam iron symbol, here superimposing the iron imagery atop his self-portrait twice. The resulting transformation of the artist’s face, inspired by the multilayered function and meaning of African tribal masks, evokes the notion of physical, spiritual, and performative modes of existence.
The first panel, Man, features a photoetching of Cole’s self-portrait – an image first Photoshopped to give him perfect facial symmetry, like the symmetry of an iron – then overlaid and embossed with the pattern of a Proctor Silex iron’s steam openings. Through these hand-colored, raised markings, Cole alludes to the process of scarification, the iron’s ability to scorch utilized to create markings of tribal association and identity.
Spirit, the center panel, meanwhile mimics an iron scorch through screenprint, leaving the steam holes that scarred Man as negative space. To achieve the image’s ghostly form, lemon juice was poured and spread onto the paper, which was then put through a photo dry mount press to apply heat. The result of these unconventional techniques is not just the burnt, brown tone of the image, but an ethereal, blurred quality that captures the spiritual core of the steam iron.
The third and final right panel, Mask, flips the self-portrait from Man upside down. Here, the iron’s presence is fully apparent, as a birds-eye view of its handle and top are overlaid to obfuscate Cole’s rotated visage. The cartoonish iron, created via woodcut print, becomes a caricature of a mask, with slit eyes, an enlarged and protuberant nose. In combining the notions of Man and Spirit, Mask sees Cole evoke the traditional function of an African mask – as an object used to make a spirit come to, or through, an individual person.
