I Love a Parade

                                                                          RUMORS

Recently I received a rejection email from a show I had applied to. Many shows offer to send along the juror’s comments if artists request them, and I usually take advantage of this, hoping for constructive feedback to better my application presentation.  Applying to shows, getting accepted, waitlisted and rejected is all just part of the job and I do my best to try and learn from the process, look forward to the ones I do get into and not get too down about the shows I don’t get into. Jurors usually rotate, so each year’s scores could fluctuate, depending on the jury members that year. 

When I received the juror comments I was stunned. One juror scored me a 1, The lowest score and said my booth shot seemed mass produced. Another scored me 1, with the comment that they had heard rumors that my work was mass produced in a production studio, that the show producer should perhaps request more information and videos. It’s not the 1 that deeply bothered me, it’s the score based on a rumor about me and my work. This juror suggested the show look into me via my website and social media, and it seems like they could not take the time themselves prior to scoring me a 1. 

This particular show application allowed 4 images of my work, one booth shot and 200 characters to describe my work, materials used, and artist process. 200 characters*  to describe the fabrics made in collaboration with other artists, my goals of creating conversation-starting, functional bags that are sturdy and last a long time, my vintage machines that my husband helps refurbish, and my process which can take months in some cases when it comes to the animal bags I make. They ask for your website, social media, etcetera. I assumed this was to fill in the blanks and that the jurors would also be reviewing them. Shows ask for accurate photos of what your current booth set up is like. To submit a sparser, “gallery-like” booth shot would not be a true representation of my work and I fear this could harm me when the show judges come around to assess at the actual show. I have been at shows where my neighbor was asked to leave because their set up looks nothing like their submitted photos.

If you know me you know my social media is filled with process shots, works in progress, dogs sleeping on my sofa while I work, and photos of my many antique machines that do super cool things. My website has a page devoted to custom work, a front page that currently has a personal thank you note to customers and highlights images of my last year or work and shows. Anyone who comes to my booth and asks about my sewing machine gets a giddy earful about them all, at this point I think over 11.  

I have been very out of sorts for a week now trying to process this all. It has rocked me. I’m having a hard time working through it, I’m definitely losing sleep over it. My emails to the show producers have not been remotely satisfying and I get the impression they are not a show that truly cares about supporting artists as they have given me no support in dispelling these rumors. Even though I figured it was a longshot, I asked for the judge’s name who heard the rumors so I could have a chance to find out where they heard this about me. They said the jurors' names are private. I then asked to at least have an idea where the juror heard the rumor. They offered me no help on that front, and thanked me “for my understanding.”

Truthfully, I have absolutely zero understanding of this. 

Many of you have suggested ideas of where the rumors came from. I cannot comprehend a fellow artist being so selfish and unfathomably cruel that they would make these things up about me. I suffered through high school like the rest of us misfits and had a long dance and service industry career so I’ve definitely put in the time and lived through many rumor situations. I naively believed that at over 50, having found a solid community of artists to exist and work in and being far from my teen years that I would be spared any more of this shit. 

After thinking about it a while I realize that I can’t control things like this happening. The only thing I have control over is my own reaction to things. I have the choice to move forward or to freeze. That being said, I want to share my motivation each day I sit down and work for anyone who cares to listen. 

My mom died suddenly when I was 19. She had left a message on my answering machine when I was out seeing David Bowie at a Tin Machine concert and the next day she had an aneurysm. We had just started to grow into more of an adult relationship. I moved out at about 18 after I graduated high school. I went to New York to study dance and we wrote letters every day. I left college after a year and joined a dance company. Our relationship was growing and we were actually talking about stuff, not just parent/kid business.  I was living on my own and we were starting to talk about the stuff that matters, more like equals. I still remember our first post dance performance late night diner meal, when I ordered a cup of coffee and she giggled about how I was now “a real grown up.” That meal was also our last late night diner meal. An entire adulthood of mom time robbed from me by one giant aneurysm. Fuck you aneurysm for stealing my mom and forcing me to figure it all out on my own, no mom to go to or share life with as an adult.

My mom was an amazing artist. She worked in the advertising department at Higbee’s department store downtown in Cleveland, Ohio. The women she drew were extraordinary, that awesome 50’s style fashion illustration. She also was a seamstress, she made so many of my clothes and dance costumes.

After she died my aunt and dad gifted me my first sewing machine. I was unable to touch it for a long while, maybe a few years. When I finally did it proved to be comforting and joyous, a way of deciding to somehow pick myself up, be stronger and bolder than I knew how and start to move forward through my life, like the miles of fabric moving through my machine. I was living on my own and I would stay up well into the morning after work learning to make clothes, performing something that seemed like magic, cutting, sewing and creating fabulous things that fit a body out of a flat piece of fabric. I used my spare bartending money to buy more books on sewing. Those clothes grew into dance costumes. My original machine traveled with me to so many different apartments as I moved around, a constant in my life. Dance costumes and then drag costumes. Then a home furnishings business. Each project dedicated to my mother. Conversations in my head with her about the projects as I worked on them, laughter and toasts of wine and martinis at both successes and massive failures. That home furnishings business turned into a bag making business after my own 2 kids were born. A business that rescued me from a truly awful, soul sucking restaurant job that made me miserable and not very much money. A business that when my kids were little they would sit on the floor next to me as I worked playing with fabric scraps the same way I did with my mom.

That judge accusing me of mass production is heartbreaking. I know they have no way of knowing all this about my life story. But I am prolific in my production because I need to be. I make each and every piece. Creating gives meaning and depth to my life. It makes me happier than anything else. I sit down with the intent to make joyful and vibrant things that make people happy as a way to honor my mother, stand on the groundwork she laid for me as an artist, keep her spirit alive. Every single stitch of my cluttered booth is for her. When things are challenging in my life my work is what carries me through. I produce a huge amount because it keeps me level and happy between kid and dog parenting and my work makes others happy. What more is there than this?

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