So over here I have images that are divided by pattern, shells, greens, people.
I can tell you what doesn't sell well are people images, people don't like people.
I started in 1989 making the plates.
I always did sort of handmade things but not necessarily de-coupage but I used paper images.
I kind of got obsessed with sort of printed matter and that would make these sort of funny
collage things and I would sell them to a shop in Boston.
And then one day I just sort of kind of fused together, right, so somebody gave me some
glass plates and I glued stuff under them and then I sold them in the shop and they
were nice but the materials were original and the glue didn't take well to them and
then maybe six months later I discovered sort of like reprinting the matter, the materials
and then that worked much better and then that was the first time I actually made something
that looked finished that I could actually sell.
When I first started it was really like, I started with nothing, I mean I had a limited
supply of things.
I made some collage plates, I brought them somewhere and then the woman was like, can
we wholesale these plates for you?
And I was like, I don't know what that is.
And she was like, well we'll take them to a show and people will buy them and then they'll
sell them.
And I was like, all right, this show happened and I got like a $40,000 order and I'm like,
it's just me and my friends in the neighborhood like gluing and making things and then finding
recycling boxes from the trash and then like packing things up and then shipping them to
stores and my favorite part is finding the imagery and making the collage and then bringing
it here and then constructioning it and seeing how it transforms into something.
I kind of wanted it to be a bigger thing but we started off by using that just one image
of it and then I figured out how to put more petals in here to make it like one big kind
of sunflower.
What's going to happen is that then these sort of guys get sort of pieced back in here
like this.
When it's all together it looks more like that and we sort of added the stem back on
the bottom so it looks sort of like a flower.
Basically all of the images are on the reverse of glass so all of the surfaces remain glass
so you can wipe them clean.
You just can't immerse anything in the water.
I mean you could but then it would look like this after you washed it.
It was like two years or so into it after being here that I was sort of like, you know
what, this is really what I'm doing and I decided to like refocus on making everything
much more personal to me.
I'm not a money person so it's just sort of things that sort of happened, you know,
it was a long process.
Like people would be like, how long have you had this store and I'm like, 18 years.
And they're like, oh.
A lot of the three dimensional things require a lot more labor and more cutting.
Like for this it's like a pinwheel geranium.
John's actually cutting out the flowers and this will require like maybe ten of those
images cut.
So after it's painted then it gets felted and then we have a gold pen that we use to
sort of finish the edge so that's what it looks like.
The business side sometimes all the numbers and things kind of scare me and I'll like
print things from the computer and stuff, I can't even cut and paste.
I really am inspired by the image, you know, how I connect to it.
I feel like images talk to me in a way.
Like I just, not to sound like I'm, oh the images talk to me.
But I respond to them.
But sometimes you really just know it's funny because I'll have a million images and I
can look at a collection and be like that will be the best selling thing.
This was a new popular item at the last show.
Eyeball.
We call it an eyeball, get it?
There's so much of this is connected to sort of deep memories and feelings for people and
myself and I think that's how I relate to it and I'm sharing with people and I think
that's what gravitates them towards it too.
Like bat, I had bat in the attic once.
You know like there's, there are those things, now that people sound wimpy like that or anything.
I discover these images in that way and then like in my shop, people kind of discover them
the same way because they're sort of flipping through stuff and then they're having a similar
experience.
I have a hard time considering myself successful, probably because it's just sort of like a
security thing.
Like there's like all this has happened and it keeps happening and I, but every year I
keep thinking like it could stop tomorrow and what am I going to do?
So maybe that's what keeps me going too, maybe it's sort of like the fire in my feet.
That's it and we, we kissed all the boxes goodbye.
