I decided to create a head on a stick – I am not sure why, I got the urge to create something to “recycle” some left over materials and the idea tickled by morbid desires.

I divided the ghastly object in three main components of turmoil; a head, a stick and a base. The base and stick were easy to do; the first being a cardboard flower holder, weighted down with some plasticine on the inside for some stability, a hole cut in the top of its folding lid and some fake grass to adorn the top. I spray painted the base in a concrete colour to give it a cemetery/ gravestone look. The stick? That was also dead simple being a leftover garden trimming (I wanted a stick with a side branch that I could break off to give the build a more natural appearance).

The head posed more of a challenge. The solution I came to was to use a “cheap” latex mask of a human and glue it onto a fake Styrofoam head. Now, using Styrofoam heads to display latex masks is a massive no-no as the Styrofoam will cause the latex to dry out but this was the easiest and cheapest way forward and, besides, I did not care about the mask drying-out – I was not ever going to “use” it in the way it was intended. In turns out, head stands are much smaller than average human heads so to make the mask fit, without losing most of the human-like qualities, I had to pad it out by sticking pieces of scrunched up kitchen roll to it’s surface – not going for any sort of neatness because, when the mask is on the ‘head’ some bits of hap-hazard scruffiness would actual benefit the result. With the mask now attached, all I had left to do was rough-cut the eye holes – so it looked like a killer had cut out the man’s eyes -, paint the thing where necessary with fake blood to make it look like a violent beheading had occurred, fill in any blank spots with liquid latex (particularly at the back) and the slap the finished head on the stick.

Overall, I am hugely impressed with the resulting creation. I am particularly proud of the epitaph on the base which reads; “Here lies Siddy Shaw, Born: 1963, Died: Horribly.”.