Mosaic Skulls

Recalling an incident from my childhood, when a Indigenous American girl in my fifth grade class brought into school (for Show and Tell) a human skull that her father (like many another U.S. soldier) had brought back from Japan as a souvenir of the Second World War, I embarked recently on a series of sculpted crumpled newspaper skulls which pay tribute to the history of Trophy Skulls, their private and public collection and display, and related subjects.




These last three were inspired by the Mask of Tezcatlipoca that now resides in the British Museum after having traveled surreptitiously all over Western Europe, from Spain to the Netherlands to Austria to Venezia and finally to England (as recounted in volume three of my novel: The Crumpled Bills.) Tezcatlipoca was of course the central deity of the Mexica. One of his more interesting titles was Necoc Yaotl, which translates as "Enemy of Both Sides." (I must say that he's a deity after my own heart!)