January, 2022 - Ina Disguise

The Inevitable Bawbag Post

January 30, 2022 No Comments

Ok so Bawbag, of Haram Bawbag fame, has got himself in very bad trouble and managed to make the papers this week.

He has got what he wanted, which was a day in court failing to defend himself and pleading guilty to show what a great guy he is (he really isn’t, but never mind. He is a perfectly normal level of good and bad with an unfortunate sideline).

So, to address what was in the papers, since it has come to my attention that people think anything journalists write is true, which it certainly isn’t, here is the correct information.

Bawbag suffers from PTSD, alongside his many other disorders, as a result of a very unstable history. Libya has not been a safe place for a long time, and at the time of the events depicted his brother had been kidnapped by ISIS.

Bawbag’s politics are somewhere to the right of ISIS, and if you consider that, alongside the fact his friends included a Jewish barber, an eastern European mechanic, me and several Asian Muslims, he isn’t particularly racist. He is however prone to lengthy rants saying whatever he thinks will hurt you most. His ex girlfriend was well aware of this and she and his other arch enemy made the most of it.

As for tracking people when he cannot directly see them, he did this with me also, and I was not his girlfriend. He basically lives as if he is going to be attacked all the time. Yes it is annoying, but it is also understandable.

Bawbag has been a royal pain in the ass, and it pains me to defend him after all the unpleasant things he has done to try and get me to return to his care, but I do not think his day in court was particularly constructive. I can only imagine what a wearing nightmare two years of being his girlfriend must have been, but my personal choice is always to avoid things getting as vicious as this where possible. Not casting any shade, I do understand how angry he is capable of making you and I am fortunate that he was kind enough and had the foresight to let me go when he did so that I did not have to go through the stress of this with him. He didn’t particularly want to fight it, he chose to annoy several more people, including me, instead.

What shocked me as a result of a brief canvas of joe public, was just how willing people are to take things at face value. Hence a mentally ill, emotionally distraught man was depicted as a monster and racist and this was accepted quite readily by people who were not at all interested in what had actually happened. This is going to be out there forever, which isn’t great. He will never improve his behaviour with no incentive, he will just get nastier and more frightened.

I am not at all interested in people so willing to make assumptions about me, Bawbag or anything else. I think anyone willing to be rude to me in the workplace or anywhere else on the basis of bullshit in the news can basically stick their attitude where the sun don’t shine. I went through enough just keeping things relatively calm with Bawbag, I am not interested in small minds and nasty negative attitudes.

creativity, motivation

The Teapots and Some News

January 24, 2022 No Comments

Ok, so the teapots were made as a word gag for Wolfe, they are named after some herbal teas that my best friend at school and I designed when we were 16. They were intended to be named as the teapots are, with personal qualities.

I see that some enterprising company has now done this, but basically the message behind the teapots was ‘do as you like, because you aren’t ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea.’

It was also an exercise in small scale sculpture, I wanted to see exactly what the medium of carpet was capable of. The answer is actually even better than this, these I now consider quite rough, however they seem to be fairly charming, since they made it into Tatler as interior pieces.

None of these would have been possible without the ego battering that was my online relationship with Wolfe, who veered between extreme kindness and a sort of feigned ignorant cruelty. Any extensive look at Wolfe will tell you this is normal stuff with him, but I adored him because it taught me an awful lot about shame and how useless it is.

I was in love with Wolfe for about ten years in total until we very successfully met, and from a rather uptight and very sceptical loner, I became sufficiently confident to not be at all worried about what people think nowadays, which paradoxically seems to have made me more attractive. Rejection is always interesting, and I do love a bit of distance when it comes to creativity.

This week I met up with the previous muse for the first time, although it was brief and I do not include the box I made for his house, which I fell in love with (see the short story Kill the Cynic on the books page for another example of me falling in love with a building) He is very nice, and probably very offput by Ina, but I was very upfront about my wish for him to not be a muse at all, so we shall see what he comes back with.

Basically my creative quirk seems to be sparked by rejection, I have never been at all interested in people that I actually spend any time with, it is always from far away. It does confuse my friends somewhat, that I will sit and stitch and think extensively about people I have no intention of actually talking to or interacting with. In this case I am more interested in the business side of things and would like to actually interact so that both of us get to retire at some point. I have been sufficiently inspired by this meeting to progress a proposed financial company and make some fresh moves towards expanding my own tiny empire.

I will talk more on this when I deal with Beach, the 1998 piece of work which in many ways I consider one of my best and most traditionally ‘arty’ pieces of work. I kind of went off on a tangent a bit with the childlike emotion after Beach, but the quirkiness does seem to appeal to people at a very deep level. Whether elitist art fans like it or not really does not matter at all if it says something to everyone else.

The short stories are actually pretty important to the creative process, so if anybody actually wants to get to know me or what the work is about, I recommend searching your favoured bookstore and downloading a couple. In time it will be clearer which ones go together but for now I think there are only two main contenders that I considered worth putting into an actual collection and that was The Best Ever... series for Wolfe, which is an exercise in self discipline when talking yourself out of an inappropriate love affair, and Stories for an Ignorant Man, which was me uncontrollably outputting for Little Shiva, whose chair is still under construction. Little Shiva got some real excellence out of me, I have no idea why or how, but such achievements take a little longer.

creativity, motivation

Gypsy at heart, Geek Chic and Palette Handbags

January 23, 2022 No Comments

These bags were made for the Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing collection, made whilst I was failing to communicate with David Wolfe, health guru, mainly but not entirely due to my crap sense of self after years of gaslighting.

There was no way of otherwise communicating with him at the time, and as I was overcoming quite crippling shyness, I was literally incoherent, so in addition to being carpet samples, effectively, they were saying something about me.

So I guess they say that I am a shy geek that moves around a lot and is rather fond of colour, basically.

The idea of the Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing collection was in the first case a tease, because the first thing I noticed about Wolfe was that he was promoting veganism whilst wearing wool. I also wanted to make the versatility of my chosen medium clearer, and find a new way of presenting samples. I could sit and make samples for years, but they wouldn’t be otherwise useful for anything. This was a way of getting Ina’s free marketing strategy underway whilst creating a sample. I have never been particularly worried about sales potential of these items as they are intended to illustrate what is possible.

It is also a marketing trick, being in several tag zones is always better than sitting in only one as more people get to see your stuff, and between these and the teapots, which I will talk about in my next post, they were a good idea. Clicking through them on the site will get you to the etsy store page, where you will see how they look on actual people.

They take about a month of fairly hard work to make, and generally speaking I start with a pile of materials and my hands kind of do it without me, so vague memories of images I have seen come through without much input from me.

I have developed a bit over the years and the visuals get more complicated with time, but generally speaking, the David Wolfe items were all simple, commercial, generated to improve marketing and widen the scope of what Ina is capable of.

creativity

Jemima Khan is Fit for Work

January 12, 2022 No Comments

Ok so it has struck me that I have not really explained any of the pieces so I will be writing a blurb for each one.

The Fit for Work collection was mainly to entertain Boris, when he was still around, and was, of course, a nod to Iain Dunkin’ Smith and his ideas about what disability means.

Therefore the people who were declared fit for work in the collection, which in time will include Dunkin’ Smith himself, were all people who either did not work, were incapable of working without displaying evidence of their innate nastiness or who were otherwise people you would not consider particularly desirable in the workplace.

Jemima was selected as she has never had to work rather than anything appalling she has done. Had I done one for her father, there may have been less attractiveness and more ‘vigour’ involved.

From a technical perspective, it was a case of amassing the correct fabric to recycle, and then recycling it in a way that would be acceptable to modern homes. The wedding dress that was recycled for the beaded portions was imported and the rest followed from there.

Although you can see I used a lot of fabric and the pieces took a lot of time, they are fully dustable as the fabric was set using resin, a far more interesting use of resin than much of the resin work I see online. These items are not at all cheap to produce, but they are amusingly like life sized toy versions of the entirely practical item I make as a result. I quite like the idea of giant artsy toys. It suits the subject in this case.

It is a messy process and takes, at times months, hence the length of time Little Shiva has taken.

I also had to take the last couple of years off working with resin as my health was not in a sufficiently great state to be able to tolerate the toxin level. The current occupants of my home take first priority, therefore I have to make sure that I am in a position to continue with that before I do anything.

Finally, apologies for my miserable post over New Year, but I am thoroughly tired of being the shiny bauble in the room, so I like to make up for it during the festive season by being utterly miserable.

Ina

creativity

New Year

January 1, 2022 No Comments

Yes I am fine, thanks for checking by, everyone.

Working on some ideas, I will be updating shortly.

Amusingly I have spent the last month or two being ripped off by a guy called Shyam, who as a retired actuary chose to rip off several financial services workers in Glasgow to fund an ‘investment bank’ he was setting up. He is probably torturing some unfortunate Indian virtual assistants as we speak.

Lovely name, but was a bit disappointed by the correct pronunciation, since it is, appropriately ‘sham’

Apart from that finally getting back into a sense of normality and catching up with some new projects.

Further update shortly.

Ina