Mask making as spiritual objects with British Nepalese Artist Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell

Images courtesy of the artist.

Words by Shams Hanieh.

I meet Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell in a local Brazilian Creperie in her native Brixton. Over tea, Maya tells me about her practice, her grandmother’s influence, and the spiritual life of objects. Maya is a multimedia artist, utilising poetry, photography, dance and video to explore her experiences as a Nepali and Caribbean woman. Her work explores the personal and the collective, from personal family histories, to the traditional craft of Nepalese mask-making. Maya’s first solo show Folklore Imaginary opened on September 24th at 87 Gallery in Hull, meditating on themes of migration, family, masquerade, and the relics of imperialism.

The artist’s  practice and exploration of cultural rituals has been handed down to her matrilineally; her grandmother who raised her was the first Nepali woman to have a solo exhibition in the UK. “My grandma came to the UK, to Brixton, in the 80s. She was brought up in Darjeeling, and her mum was Hindu, while her dad was Buddhist and Christian. She was sent to convent school to be a nun, but ran away, and moved to Goa” she recounts, “So, she came from quite a complex faith background, and this strong religious artwork that you see in Nepal really influenced her practice.”

Such a diverse and wide-scoping influence informed Maya’s understanding of her cultural background, and inherently her artistic practice. She shows me a photo of her grandmother’s exhibition opening at The Ritzy in Brixton, featuring a rather disgruntled baby Maya with a Lahkey mask constructed by her grandmother behind her. “I have an early memory of this big red mask with fangs made by my grandma being on the wall when I was younger, and I was really freaked out by it. But then she told me that it’s a figure called the Lahkey which protects children and townspeople. It’s celebrated all year around in a lot of different festivals in Nepal, in a ritual called the Lahkey Dance” Maya explains. 

“There’s a lot of history in that specific mask, which is why it’s the one I’m choosing to respond to. It’s related to my relationship with my grandma, and that being the gateway into learning about my Nepali heritage as someone from the diaspora.” Maya explores this relationship in her audiovisual piece ‘Protector of the Children’, which blends family photographs, transcriptions of court documents, and a video-performance of Maya making a mask, shot during a residency at Space A in Kathmandu, Nepal. 

As with all the themes Maya plays with, masks have a political meaning for her, beyond the personal. “I look at masks like spiritual objects. They, like other cultural artefacts, were taken into these very sterile conditions in museums, so their life, and cultural and spiritual potential is being cut off” she reflects, “Through making masks, actually activating them, and using them in play or in performance, I feel that’s a way to let them live.”

Maya’s entry into mask-making and exploring a variety of mediums came about almost through necessity. “I did my BA in Photography at London College of Communication. When lockdown happened in my last year in university, I had no access to any of the dark rooms, which was a huge barrier in creating what I envisioned. This is also when the BLM movement was very charged, and I thought a lot about Britain's culpability in all of this, as well as their theft of cultural artefacts. I wanted to respond to that, and bring my own identity into my work, so I made my first video performance piece called ‘Adding a Face’. This piece changed the way I looked at making art, using sculpture and performance for the first time.” ‘Adding a Face’ depicts fractured bronze casts of Maya’s likeness, along with a veil made of traditional Nepalese fabric, placed in a windy mass of leafy branches, narrated with Maya reciting a chant-like poem. The movement of the masks and textiles within this natural setting alludes to the spirituality of the objects, while the fractured nature of the masks and the haunting narration points to a disruption of this spirituality.

Hearing about Maya’s use of multiple mediums, her diverse background, and her exploration of the personal and the political, the idea of multiplicity and plurality seems to be a running theme. “I think, being dual heritage, you pick up on some of the nuances others might not. Going to Nepal, having grown up in London speaking English, people saw me as Western and as Black, not as Nepali. You realise how constructed race is, and how ethnicity is so culturally shaped”, she comments.

“I think in our generation, there’s a new understanding of multiplicity, and what it is to be a person. We’re getting unconditioned on what a person is meant to look like, act like, live like.” In this transforming context, Maya’s multimedia practice illustrates a generation’s layered understanding of plurality. Her exploration of the personal, political, spiritual, gives rise to new – more plural – forms of identity.

Discover more from Maya here.