Frock Turned Throw Pillow
{a personal history of re-use, from "Look Build Question repeat"}
I’d wait with the shopping cart, sitting on the lower shelf usually reserved for bulk bags of toilet paper and party cases of Coke. I’d move it back and forth like a skateboard by locking my left knee, my right, then left again. Over time, random items filled the cart. Each would entertain me until the next arrived: a giant green glass plant dome, a painting of a pipe-smoking ship captain, a birdcage. Every item told a story with its level of decay. The glass cracked, the painting written on, and the birdcage door-less.
My mother was a thrift-shopaholic, with a preference for Goodwill stores. We had spent most of my life moving from one Navy base to another, not allowed to paint the government housing walls or collect more stuff than we could move. When we transferred to Bremerton, my father planned his retirement, and my parents bought their own house. My mom went nuts. She spent her days redecorating, rewiring, re-covering, and repainting. Embracing impermanence (the fun was in the reworking), everything was purchased used: trinkets, fabric, photos, and furniture. Vases, suitcases, and musical instruments. All of it salvaged from Goodwill and garage sales.
My mom shared this passion for rummage homemaking with her sister. They named their hobby Dicky-Decorating. Together, while their husbands were at work, they’d spend weekdays on the local Goodwill and thrift-store circuit. They’d drive over an hour to visit the best locations. Monday they started in Bremerton, by Wednesday they had made it to Tacoma. She would arrive home and unload the daily haul in front of us kids. Evenings were spent rearranging the items around various rooms of our home. When she died, we had spent ten years in that house, and it had undergone at least a hundred complete overhauls. Somehow, she always re-combined her collection of bits and pieces into acomfortable, coherent whole. Each theme, however, was short lived. For half a year it was coral and teal inspired by vintage Miami. It had looked like an old Victorian, the home of a sea-captain’s widow, and like the proud clubhouse of a 1940s basketball team.
A few weeks into every summer, I began tagging along on these shopping trips. After an hour or so of sifting through the smelly racks of clothes and mismatched dishes, I would grow disinterested and grumpy, declare it all junk, and man my post on the shopping cart. My mother never grew bored. She drifted through the aisles; her movement determined only by her attraction to objects on the shelves. Watching her curate offered an unintentional, home-spun lesson in post-modernism. Items both high and low claimed equal space in the cart. A blend of recent and old were thrown in as the cart’s contents swelled into an abundant pastiche of all places and times. Upon entering the cart, each item was detached from its original meaning and purpose. I’d ask questions like, “what on earth could this be good for?” (re-wire it and it’s a lamp), and “don’t you have enough mini teacups?” (they’re good for starting plants).
We’d start our counterclockwise path in the electronics, where she’d offer to buy me a broken eighties walk-man, or a dismantled video game. The art section was full of old portraits that would be become stand-ins for our own family photos. My aunts and uncles were replaced by silver gel prints of Kennedy look-a-likes in ties and white gloves, standing proudly before a new Ford. The textiles section offered endless fabrics that I would one day sit on. An old parachute, transformed into slip-covers; a frock turned throw-pillow. Finally we’d arrive at the book section. Soft backs were only ten cents and hard were twenty-five. There was no restraint or self-editing here. If she liked the pattern on a spine, it went in the cart. Would an old set of World Book Encyclopedias look cute on the book shelf? Twenty in the cart. Sudden impulse to learn photography, study the fashion of coastal Italy, or add Moby Dick to my summer reading list? All in the cart.
The blanket approval of any books put in the cart led to some eye opening experiences once home. I definitely read Go Ask Alice a few years too early, and got privately obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy when I should have been playing tag. In books too old for me, I grew to love the fragments of language that I could understand, though often only poetically. I would scan for tiny beautiful phrases to write and rewrite in my sketchbook, until their meaning was all my own. What did the words “the strangeness of beauty” mean in cursive, bubble letters, or uppercase?
Years later my mom got me two weekend shifts at the bookstore where she worked. I’d spend hours playing Tetris with the shelves. Turning-in an “A” book to move all the others an inch to the left, one by one, down 20 feet of shelves so an especially beautiful “P” book could be faced out. Books of a series created patterns across the shelves with their orange spines. Covers faced out next to one another were combined through proximity, and created new stories with disjointed, run-on titles.
Today I rarely visit Goodwill, but I often wander antique stores collecting printed materials, which generate design ideas and spark my creative process. In some ways I am still a Dicky-Decorator. I appropriate elements and forms from various times and places. Through fragmentation and juxtaposition, I re-contextualize both elements and form; reintroducing them in a fresh way. Many of the elements are disconnected from their original purpose, gaining new meaning through new associations and pairings. Others carry inherent meaning, narratives, and histories, which can enrich a contemporary design, or be re-translated altogether. The lessons I learned from summers spent in Goodwill have been essential to the formation of this thesis. Some lessons are clearly articulated in projects such as “Field Manual” (p.84) and “Methods Employed” (p.96), but others influenced me in larger ways, urging me to create a process driven, generative body of work. Like this thesis, Dicky-Decorating was about instinctively following attractions, responding to catalysts, and reconfiguring to create new meaning.