The making of

It’s a strange experience doing art. Sometimes you don’t.
Often times it doesn’t feel like art. It’s making, it’s exploring, it’s chasing an idea, trying to see what would happen if. And suddenly you have a thing. Maybe it looks like what you intended. Maybe there was never an intention. But it’s a thing and it’s beautiful, unusual, it speaks.
Only now you can’t shut it up. Now it’s all the other people saying how beautiful it is – thank you that makes me feel so great. And, are you marketing it, you should definitely be selling stuff like this. Thanks, and no – and that makes me feel really not so great.

Is art a journey or a commodity? How do you even get into art in the commercial sense? I have no idea. I ask, yet again, what is the difference between selling this strange thing I made at the local school market and selling it in/to(?) a gallery? Who decides that?

Thoughts I now have, that I don’t know what to do with.

Except keep making art. That I cant stop doing. I opened the gate now I cant get the horse back inside the barn (not trying all that hard).

The experience of making this piece was strange. All the ideas for it come from somewhere else. I was already making the textile scales for a jacket. I was already using beading in another pangolin related project (I will keep the story of how the pangolins come into it, and where the fabric comes from, for another day). I had in my head this idea or image of a epaulette, as a smaller breakdown of the jacket. Something that wouldn’t take months (if not years) to complete. And I like how blingy military epaulettes can be, the way it brackets the shoulder, the way the braid swings with the body. All that was sitting in my head.

Then one day I sat at my dining table – I think I meant to cut more of the textile scales. And I was thinking about a friend who was leaving the country immanently. Who I was going to miss, who always, always, asked about the jacket project – she is an avid sewer herself. And suddenly this design was there. But more than that. Suddenly I had the impetus to make it. I thought I should do this because she is someone who would wear such a thing. I think, just in that moment, I gave myself permission to make it.

Then the fun began. Because it was all spur of the moment. It was whatever was lying around. There was no preparatory sketch or planning.

I made it on black felt, ‘cos that was the sturdiest base material I could come up with. This was also the first time I got the opportunity to test out layering up the textile scales. Which turned out to be problematic because every one of those textile scales is lightly different in size and shape. Entirely by design, since pangolin scales all vary slightly from wear. But it meant each one needed to be positioned individually.

I feel I should also mention here that the whole thing was hand stitched (mostly because this idiot has lost the power cable to her sewing machine – and also just ‘cos I like hand stitching). In fact if you look carefully you will see the scales are actually off centre by the end. I tell myself I am the only person who will notice that.

I also made my life harder by doing both the beading and sewing the scales on at the same time. Like systematically it would have been easiest to sew the scales onto the felt, finish that. THEN do the beads. But no. It was Saturday morning and I was just excited to do the beads.

Why grey beads? ‘Cos I had only two colours of beads in the house and the green ones are for the other pangolin project (Dont worry I have now solved this problem). BUT I was also confident that the grey would pick up the colours in the textiles without overwhelming them.

But seriously, learn from my mistake, do the beads last. If there is some universal swear jar, I contributed to it magnificently every time my thread caught in the beads while I was trying to attach the textiles. Which I did in grey thread ‘cos somehow I didn’t have any black. And I must have poked a million holes in myself as there were so many pins involved. But I managed not to bleed (onto anywhere conspicuous).

Finally, I was in the home stretch, beads done, textiles done, except all those beads get bloody heavy. This sucker was going to need some structure after all. Okay, I decided to stay in the spirit of the piece, so I raided the garbage for a milk bottle. Which led to a new problem. Milk bottles are not round, they are square. How do I persuade the plastic to take on a new shape, and do it fast, as I only have a week left before the going away party?

Experimentation time. I tied the plastic to a mason jar I found in the back of a cupboard and submerged the whole thing in boiling water, then let it dry in the sun. Remarkably this worked. The plastic held its new shape, the mason jar had just the right curvature. And the felt didnt give me too much argument about being fitted over and together.

Some downsides. A bunch of the stitching shows on the underside, in part because I forgot that those parts would show, I was so focussed on getting the broach pins securely stitched down so the piece wouldn’t wiggled around everywhere. But I think my friend will forgive me.

I also forgot to get more pictures of the finished item and of her wearing it

And of course her comment to me on receiving it was, Im too scared to wear it. I will hang it up on the wall.

Dammit.