Crafty Diversions: Lucha Libre!

I was perusing some bloggers from the Dye-No-Mite swap and came across Teresa's. She had a weird looking picture, which was apparently from this website from the Netherlands described as "a fine collection of random stuff such as cool inventions and people with really bad days."

Well, part of the collection (#26) included some knitted masks that look like lucha libre masks! This is my favorite from the knitted mask collection. The masks were created by artist Chrystl Rijkeboer, who's work centers around her "astonishment about human life." She describes on her website,

"My work is figurative and recognisable but shape and proportions are not necessarily correct or 'beautiful', what matters is the sensation they evoke. You can always view my work in two ways: kind, pleasant and innocent, or frightening, condemning and guilty."

Not only are the artist's art and projects creative, odd, intriguing and ingenous, they are provocative and progressive. Many of her projects are made from human hair. Yup. Here are some film stills featuring human hair getting spun into yarn from her 2005 "Stolen Identity" project. She has so many intriguing projects that it's really hard for me to select a favorite...There's the hair-covered medicine cabinet highlighting the vain consumer in all of us, the odd hairy balls with teeth illustrating society's fear of immigration and multiculturalism, the gnome army symbolizing the violence in peacekeeping and occupation, and there's this hairy chair which was the artist's commentary on social and sex discrimination: