Behind the (animal) mask: Liz Sexton elevates papier-mâché to high art
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Hunched over her work bench with a box cutter, Liz Sexton carves out the spikes on the back of a horseshoe crab.
“This looks dangerous because it is,” she says.
The crab is papier-mâché and the size of shield. Comprised of more than a dozen layers of paper bags, its shell feels as strong as one too.
“Eventually I’ll sand this smooth, but just getting out some of the bulk of material saves time,” she says.
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The crab is one of more than 15 papier-mâché animal masks and sculptures Sexton is preparing for her first-ever solo exhibition. The show, “Liz Sexton: Out of Water,” opens May 5 at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minn., as part of its yearlong “Flora & Fauna” exhibition series.
Sexton is one of the world’s preeminent artists in the medium; curator Jon Swanson says she’s elevated it to a high art.
At her home studio in St. Paul, many of these animal creatures — an Atlantic walrus, a humpback angler fish, a polar bear — stare down at her from the shelves. Others are placed around the houses in various stages of completion.
Many of us have dabbled in the medium as kids. For Sexton, it’s her fulltime job.
“I used mâché as a verb. I don’t know if it’s a verb,” she says, laughing.
Her masks are incredibly lifelike. And papier-mâché is only step one. She can spend upwards of 100 hours on a mask, honing the details using woodworking techniques, be that carving more than a hundred tri-pointed teeth of a marine iguana, or using an orbital sander to achieve the milky smooth skin of a beluga whale.
“For most people, I feel like when you’ve been doing something for a while, you get more efficient,” Sexton says. “And I just find ways to make it harder on myself, but in ways that I feel are rewarding.”
The result is that these papier-mâché pieces, like the horseshoe crab, are incredibly strong and robust. Sexton receives commissions from around the globe, so they must withstand all the perils of international shipping. And the masks, she says, are meant to be worn, after all.
“I'm an anxious person in general,” Sexton says. “Every time I send the piece into the world, I think of all the ways it could go wrong. So, I just like to prepare for everything.”
Her partner, Ben Toht, is a fellow creative and collaborator. He shoots photos and creates gifs of Sexton wearing her masks in the wild, which will also be featured in the exhibition. Watching the masks progress from their initial lumpy gumdrop shape, he says, is incredible, and jarring.
“One will be sitting on a radiator — it was the walrus, I think,” Toht says. “It scared me as I walked down the stairs. When she paints it, they just become photo real.”
Like many of us, Sexton learned papier-mâché as a kid — her dad taught her. For many years, she did it as a hobby. Sexton studied both English and art at St. Olaf College, and initially took the language career path.
“I moved around a lot. I was in France and Germany,” she says of her time living in small apartments in Europe. With papier-mâché, “you don't need a lot of supplies or space. You get some newspapers for free, some flour and water, and you can make whatever you want.”
In her free time, she would make costumes and props for weddings. The turning point was Halloween in New York, when she and Toht were living in Brooklyn. For the city’s annual Halloween parade, she made them masks of the city’s patron saint, the rat.
“It was kind of incredible,” Toht says. “With all the insanity of New York, and all the insanity of New York Halloween, these always got a lot of attention. People love the rats.” They recall how people would chant “New York City rats” at them.
One year for Halloween, Sexton made raven masks and it made the front page of the Gothamist, the couple recalls.
“It just encouraged me to keep going,” Sexton says.
Since then, Vogue Singapore has used her masks in video shoots. And the New York Times Style Magazine commissioned 70 animal busts for a star-studded 2019 event and featured her in a story about the medium. The team behind the reboot of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” also commissioned props from her.
“This was one of my favorite shows growing up. So, it was fun to make some weird stuff out of papier-mâché for the show,” says Sexton. She recalls a story about when the producers and show creator Joel Hodgson stopped by her studio to see her progress. The rocket ships she was making were still unfinished and had not been painted yet, so they looked lumpy.
“They were like, “Is it going to look like that?” she says, laughing. “Joel was great. He immediately shut them down and was like, ‘Puppetry is punk rock. She can do whatever she wants.’ So, it was sweet to have that affirmation.”
Sexton and Toht moved back to Minnesota from New York right before the pandemic. Her family, a family of artists, lives here. As Sexton rips up paper bags, she says they are surprised by her career, but very excited.
“My dad finds it funny that he taught me how to do papier-mâché, making a pinata when I was five,” she says. “He’s like, ‘Wow, that really set off a chain of events.’”
Sexton has also been an animal lover since she was a kid, and she’s particularly keen on marine life. Part of her artistic process, she says, is doing deep research into her subjects.
“She has a lot of animal factoids that are pretty interesting from her research,” Toht says.
As she works, she talks with ease about how the blood of horseshoe crabs is used for vaccines or describes the unusual mating habits of angler fish.
“Oh, another fun fact: Manatees can regulate their buoyancy by releasing gas from their bodies,” she says, laughing. “I put that in the show notes because I thought kids would appreciate it.”
This made her a perfect fit for the Minnesota Marine Art Museum – whose motto is “Great Art Inspired by Water”—the curators say.
At the museum along the Mississippi River in Winona, one of the curators, Dave Casey stands in the gallery during the installation process. He’s wearing the milky beluga mask.
“I've probably worn most of them,” Casey says, his voice resonating inside the mask. “You can't not try them on.”
Lining the gallery walls will be Toht’s photographs and cinemagraphs (essentially high-end gifs) of Sexton wearing the masks around the state. She poses nonchalantly in water-related sites, from the shores of Lake Superior to the Maryland Coin laundry in St. Paul.
“There is a lot of humor in these. I mean, they are people wearing animal masks in places where you wouldn’t expect it,” Casey says. “But there is an environmental message here as well: The animals are being displaced by the human growth of cities, so their native habitats are being lost and they’re being to forced to live in human spaces.”
Co-curator Jon Swanson says the medium is the message.
“She's making this beautiful high art out of Amazon boxes, Target bags. It's brilliant,” Swanson says. “I think all of us in some grade school experience got our hands wet dipping newspaper in plaster of Paris and making a form of some sort. Well, she’s elevated this to high art.”
The museum has hired models to wear masks and mingle with guests at the opening.
“I’m super excited to see how people respond,” Sexton says. Sexton’s first artist tour at the museum on May 6, is already sold out. There will be another one in August.
A perfectionist, Sexton will refine many pieces until the day of the exhibition opening. Back in her studio, she uses a power drill to create the nostrils of the marine iguana.
“You can breathe,” she shouts.
Liz Sexton: Out of Water” has a preview party Friday, May 5, at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. The exhibition runs through Sept. 3.
