The late 1960s found Jack Shadbolt re-evaluating his past imagery while assembling his 1969 retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which included native themes of the late 1940s and ritual and fetish themes of the 1950s. In the winter of 1968/1969, he painted at his summer home at Downes Point on Hornby Island. Once used by First Nations people as a graveyard, the point was also said to be haunted by the spirit of a female shaman. Shadbolt was also working out his feelings about Emily Carr and the spell her work had cast on him. Out of this fertile ground emerged the Fetish series. Shadbolt described it as a “ritual presentation through fetishistic masks and devices”, and produced works on this theme until the early 1970s. Ermerging on the left is a carved mask-like form, attached to a mechanical apparatus stitched and bound together with tires, daggers and animal heads. This work is an important early example of what would become Shadbolt’s highly acclaimed Fetish series. Mysterious and powerful, Fetish Mask manifests Shadbolt’s inner shaman – the artist who mediates between the worlds.