Expanding Universe
Massa Chula
Mode
A separate fashion label emerging from the same world —
streetwear, ensembles, and objects for the body,
carrying the visual language of the practice into cloth.
Surface as text — the cracked, veined face as a record of everything the material has survived.
A single face, golden and cracked, pressed into the ochre mineral earth that made it. In this work the mask does not rest on a surface — it is absorbed by it. Gold returning to gold. The vein-lines map a territory that is simultaneously skin and landscape.
The Termite series does not repeat. Every mask inhabits a different mineral register — different pigments, different grounds, different temperatures of light. Together they form a chromatic argument about the range of what a face can hold.
Crimson over teal stone. The mask's body is the colour of blood but its ground is the colour of deep water. The contrast is not decorative — it is elemental. Fire resting on cold.
Some works in this series anchor themselves to the earth. This one hovers. The pale face against the electric mineral blue creates a sense of suspension — of something not yet fully arrived, or not yet fully gone.
A pale mask, upward-facing, traced with purple veins on a ground of vivid mineral blue. The brightness of the ground — that rare electric cerulean — transforms this from a study of earth into a study of sky. The mask is both buried and ascending.
The most dramatic chromatic confrontation in the series: indigo and magenta against warm red laterite. The mask does not recede into the earth — it erupts from it. This is Termite at its most charged, its most alive.
Indigo blue against red laterite. The mask presses itself into the warm iron earth of West Africa — its cool chromatic world in opposition to the fire below. Magenta veins run across the surface like a map of everything the body has absorbed from the ground beneath it.
The final work. The mask is horizontal — not standing, not pressing upward. It lies in the red earth the way a stone lies, or a body lies. The series returns to stillness. Teal light on warm red ground. The veins continue their silent record.
A teal-green mask, reclining in red laterite, the black veins running quietly across its surface. After the intensity of the centrepiece, this work closes the series with calm. The mask has settled. The earth receives it. The chapter ends.
The sixth mask inhabits a chromatic world of its own — violet mineral stone, hot magenta veins running across dark teal flesh. This is the Termite series at its most atmospheric: the face lit from within, the ground almost luminous around it.
Hot magenta veins across dark teal flesh, set in violet-grey mineral stone. This is the work that opened the collection — and the one that closes it. The series returns to the face that made it visible.
"The surface of a painting is a record of everything the body has survived."— Massa Chula, Termite Series, 2023–2024