Selling your Soul
As someone that makes stuff, and always will, what happens when we then sell those things?
As I was sat in my car this morning, a sleeping baby in the back seat and a lovely view over the town from the park car park, I naturally picked up my phone and decided to stare at what other people were looking at instead. Whilst scrolling, I noticed an illustrator’s reel of her desk space featuring a coaster I had made maybe 4 or 5 years ago. Just sat there, being used and blending right into all her other belongings. When I first spied it, I honestly had a slight tinge of panic. I hated making those coasters, they were timely, irritating and made mid-pandemic when I was desperately trying to sell anything I could to keep our little business afloat. A second watch of the reel and a tingle of pride and familiarity washed over me. I made that, with my own hands, in my own kitchen, wedged into part of a day when another baby was having a sleepy nap.
It got me thinking, when do the things we make as creatives no longer belong to us? Ive thought about this a few times over the years. When we had the shop, people would come in and buy the things we made and take them home. Sometimes, when out for a walk, I would see those things - especially prints - in peoples homes. Almost like spotting an animal out in the wild. When customers came in and talked about how much they loved ‘their’ print, or if we had a matching coster to ‘their’ other one, it always felt like a funny joke as usually they didn’t know we were the ones making it all as well as selling it.
I was listening to Paloma Faith on How to Fail recently (on yet another long car journey from Birmingham to Cornwall - but more on the saga of moving later) and she talked about how she had created her album as a way of processing the break up of a recent relationship. That the process of making was so important to her and how it had helped in her healing. Once the record was finished, she talked about how someone at her record company had asked how could they commodity her grief? How could they market it as ‘entertaining’. I think it’s a constant battle between inherently creative people and non creative people. I make stuff because I breathe. I can’t imagine how my day would go if I wasn’t going to make something, thinking about how to make something or planning out how to make something. At the end, selling it is usually a secondary thought (and probably why I find marketing so hard!)
During this big move, we have had to look at all of our belongings again in a way you only do when you have to take everything you own and move it to a new place. Did I really want to keep the crepe paper I bought 6 years ago to make some paper flowers? Well what if I want to make some more flowers again in the future? And what about the 20 tiny bottles I have left from when I made marbling kits? I don’t want to make and sell those kits anymore, but will I need the bottles again one day. When all these objects fuel a creative need in you so deep its encoded into your DNA, I can’t help but feel like these materials are a kind of life-force I would be silly to get rid of.
I often joke that my boys will have only paper and glue sticks to inherit. I mean, it's only partly a joke because I do genuinely worry as a ‘stuff’ person about the amount of hoarding I might allow myself in old age, but having watched my husband lose his mum young, I can honestly say that the things she made and materials she kept are some of our most precious belongings. My own mum gets very excited whenever she had a reason to go into our old studio. In the past, she’s asked if I had some ribbon, or buttons she needed for a knitting project and I just waved in the general direction of where I thought they might be in the haberdashery cabinet and left her to rummage. I love that we have a constant source of materials for making and maybe I just feel a bit jealous I don’t have endless time to go make a project for fun. Instead, I do feel the comfortable clash between my feelings of making for me, and making to survive and sell. So again, when should I sell my things? When have I processed whatever it was I needed to process through making enough to be ready to say goodbye to it?
When I think about all the things Ive made long ago, there are some things I am definitely ready to let go of. In the move I found my foundation year portfolio (which for some reason, in those days, had to be A1 which is the size of a small sail, especially when dragging it along Brighton sea front to your uni interview) and I felt very ready to throw it all in the bin without even opening it. But would my boys want to see where I started? Will one day, when I have a grumpy and angsty teenager will I be able to get it out and show him what I was thinking and feeling when I was his age? I wasn’t sure the answer to any of those questions really so I decided it was probably time to go and lobbed it into the recycling. That might sound like a shame, but there are so many things both me and Winston have made in our house, that hopefully the boys will never feel poor of our creativity. I hope that when I leave this earth, my boys will be happy to have the things I have made - although I probably should get round to cleaning out the glue stick drawer!
