Mask featured in Sisters Library display

If you are fortunate enough to meet up with Debra Fisher, the creator of the magnificent masks on display in the Sisters Library computer room, and ask her if she enjoys her work, stand back: Debra's enthusiasm is overwhelming.

"I've been doing this since the beginning of time," she said, "ever since I got hooked on theater back in 1978 in Denver, Colorado."

It was there she took on her first theater job - creating a witch's mask for a take-off on Shakespeare's "Macbeth." She never looked back.

"I love to make art of out non-traditional materials," Fisher said, as she carefully brushed dust from her beautiful mask that looks like it's made of steel, but is really paper.

"I work now predominately in paper," she said, "using 100-percent recycled pulp paper that lends itself to a variety of maché and construction techniques."

Mask-making is an art-form that goes back 7,000 years. A stone mask was found in Europe dated to the pre-ceramic neolithic period, and is now on display in the Museum de la bible et Terre Sainte, in Paris, France.

Masks have been used since antiquity for both ceremonial and practical purposes. Most times, they are worn on the face, although they may also be positioned for effect elsewhere on the wearer's body - as in parts of Australia - where aborigines wear giant totem masks that cover the entire body. On the other hand, in the Alaska and Canadian Arctic, Inuit women use tiny finger masks during storytelling and

dancing.

Artists of our Pacific Northwest Indian cultures created magnificent carved masks from cedar and other native materials. A great Native American artist of our time, Chief Lelooska, of Ariel, Washington, created magnificent articulating masks. His mask of "Tsonoqua," the witch that "ate 'bad children'" - especially "real" when worn and danced by a talented native actor - convinced many youngsters of all cultures to modify their behavior.

Along one wall of the library computer room are three of Debra's masks that speak of African culture, the center dominated by a creation she named "African Star; the Quiet Beauty." To the left of her African Star, is what she says is a "magical mask," one she named "Rising Sun," created from impressions and feelings she received in a dream about a historical black Cherokee woman, who lived in the days of slavery in the U.S.

"Like most of my masks," Debra says, "I usually dream about them, and the feelings and images are often so vivid that I get out of bed and make a sketch of what I see and feel."

To see Fisher in action, visit the OPB Web site and look at the Art Beat link - opb.org/programs/artbeat -

where you can watch her making a mask and talking about her art.