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.