My little corner of crazy

“I am stronger than my depression” sigil for anonymous

Sigil requests are open !

London-based fabric artist Lucy Sparrow just opened a very unusual and utterly charming pop-up grocery store in Bethnal Green, east London. Called The Cornershop, it sells all the everyday items a person could need with one special catch: they’re all made from felt. All of the fruit, snacks, drinks, frozen dinners, chewing gum, newspapers, and even the cash register are made of soft, fuzzy felt.

Sparrow’s awesome project was funded thanks to an overwhelmingly successful Kickstarter campaign, funding from the Arts Council and a sponsorship from UK confectionery manufacturer Swizzels Matlow. Work on the shop began in January 2014. Sparrow spent seven months painstakingly stitching together 3,944 felt items. By the time the work was finished she’d made over 250,000 stitches.

"I’ve always made big things. I like coming up with huge projects where the result is bigger than me and it takes over my life. I’m very obsessive and I want that to come across in the work and get people thinking ‘Who would be crazy enough to do this?’ I like getting up at the crack of dawn and beavering away at something, knowing that so many other people are still asleep.

The felt shop was born out of a desire to make an exhibition that was so all-encompassing that when everyone came in they were just blown away by the extent of the work, the labour involved.”

Lucy Sparrow’s stitched cornershop will be open throughout August. All of her felt shop products are available for purchase with prices ranging from £3 ($5 US) for a cigarette lighter to £840 ($1420 US) for the store’s cash register (the most expensive item in the shop).

Don’t worry if you can’t make it to London to check out The Cornershop in person. You can still visit the shop to peruse and even purchase its products via The Cornershop website.

Photos by Rosie Hallam

Here is a bit about my history, and why it’s important to know where and when I became political and why I do the art I do the way I do it and WHY I PAINT NUDES all the time, OF ANY GENDER.

I like it when people discuss things with me and they often teach me a lot. A big part of the era of feminism/activism I grew up in was maintaining respectful discourse with peers and other activists.  Knowing who our allies are and educating them respectfully and with kindness and good intention. 

I’ve always hated the silencing of dissent. Silencing artists and writers is a tool used by oppressors.   If there are more than one of you, and you stalk and harass an artist or writer, or report their work as violent when it isn’t…you’re the powerful one in that situation.  You are the oppressor, and you may not believe you fit into those jackboots BUT YOU DO. You have the energy and time to harm someone, to silence them, and they, being a single person creating content, do not have time to fight it. It takes time to make art, to write about it, to edit it, to post it online and it takes guts to put your name on it. There is not enough time to create, make, share and discuss if you also have to take the time to respond to untrue reports of abusive content, violent content, or find and then block/ignore sock puppets sending you really really aggressively demeaning messages. 

If you would like to kill content, stifle content creators, or harm my ability to speak, you’re fighting on the wrong side. You’re in the same basket as the fundamentalists that hate pro-choice works, the religious groups that hate nonreligious work, the MRA’s that hate body-positive portraits, the homophobes that hate trans and gay-rights related work, the Big Capital guys who want socialist/lefty work to disappear, and the people who just think women should shut up and go back to the kitchen. By attacking someone who agrees with you, you are doing The Man’s dirty work for him.They don’t even need to infiltrate or pay someone to stalk us all, you are ‘cleaning up the trash’ for them.

It’s even more shocking and outrageous when not only do you have to do all this because, as a woman or a person of color or indeterminate gender, you already get a dozen messages a day of sexist or racist crap-taking, but when you start getting them from people you agree with because you are not feminist enough or calling you by racial slurs, of a variety of races no less. Yes today I had to block someone who called me a n-word babykiller and then the next message, I had to block someone who called me a washisho bitch. I can fight sexist, racist shit coming from sexist racists without qualm or loss of energy. But when my sisters start to attack me, it really is heartbreaking. Our mutual enemies are entertained when you attack me or others we agree with.

I do not, I never will, send those kinds of messages to people who are fighting, even slightly, on the side of good, right things. I would never attack someone for being ignorant- that’s the opportunity to educate someone, not a chance to set the dogs on them. And since I first became active politically I have believed in and striven for unity and equal rights. I have had my ballistic ranting, of course and when I was brand-new to activism I was VERY aggressive and outspoken. I tried to put that rage to work against people who were actually racist, sexist assholes, and never even thought of turning it on other women and people of color and lgbt people, or poor people, the chornically or mentally ill, or the disenfranchised. I raged at the source of the trouble, not the people also trying in their own way to fight it. Why should we we spend our time fighting each other when there are assholes on the sidelines that should be taken down instead.

If I didn’t think these things were important, I would not spend the time to think about them, write about them,donate, volunteer. Do you? I do. I think these issues are important and I spent some time thinking hard and then finding sources and then writing this. I draw stuff, paint stuff, tattoo stuff everyday. I talk to people. If the world has passed me by and made my activism wrong or weak, well then I’ll plod along as best I can. But I want unity and equality and respect for everyone. And I feel like we’re much closer than we were twenty years ago when I first started acting out.

I’ve been extremely ill the last six weeks, getting blood drawn every other day, barely eating. I’m sick as hell right now, and the energy it took me to make this post pretty much drained me for the day. I don’t think I will address this topic again for a while, but I am glad to be able to speak about it, and to hear your thoughts as well. I am imperfect, and human, and I try to do right. I am pretty sure you all are the same, imperfect humans, and maybe together we can keep our shoulders to the wheel and our nose to the grindstone and whatever other wage-slave analogy you like to insert about us all keepin on keepin on.