Why do artists wear masks?

“No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.” The line from Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises (delivered by Tom Hardy as Bane), highlights a paradox. “Through the act of hiding you’re making yourself much more noticeable,” says the artist James Merry, who began making facial ornaments for Björk to wear on stage a decade ago. “That’s the tension that makes them powerful, the weird conflict at the heart of masks.”

Artists have long played with this duality, from the…