“An artist is someone producing things people don’t need to have.”—Andy Warhol
“I want it” is one of my 2-yr old daughter’s favorite phrases. The phrase that ranks second: “I don’t like it.” Is this not one of the earliest declarations of aesthetics? Establishing identity? The ongoing struggle between want and need?
Now that I’m 35 (today, actually!), I’ve too been thinking a lot about what I want or need, what I like and don’t like, in work and art and life. Because of Icky Love, the grit of design is now a larger part of my everyday—a way to organize my thoughts in a tangible, manageable mess (because, let’s face it, the mess of the world requires much more than a synthetic sponge and bucket).
My desire to start Icky Love comes from my habit of falling in love with odd things that make me happy. From the tiniest vase for a single lavender stem to a bowl for spools of thread or dirty pennies—I want to build homes for ordinary things. For me, being vulnerable in art and love is a constant practice—a practice that I see as becoming more and more important for understanding the rifts in humanity. Making things that bring people joy is a way to connect, to remind us that the weird and the beautiful are bridges.
This being my first post, I’ve decided to write to my imagined audience (please let that be YOU), a brief manifesto because (1.) I LOVE MANIFESTOS and (2.) as a poet/potter, shouldn’t I be declaring my own “insolent challenge to the stars!” as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes in The Futurist Manifesto? So here goes nothing and everything. Welcome to Icky Love.
ICKY LOVE MANIFESTO
A pot is not without politic. It is the dark hole
Left by a finger, the shade of a hand,
The dent of an imagined stream
Threaded by the woman whose sentence
Hangs like a goldfish from the moon.
The gravitas of gravity,
A home for a single grape,
The intentional pull still pulling
The mess of early morning heartsickness
& bone dry mistakes.
Carve this: a tired mind is a kind of relentless
Mother, her lists crooked
As a branched plumeria.
Exchange humankind for humanness
To find your bluebird is a belly full of birds.
I will go meet you there—
Where cuts a history
That cannot replicate love’s single
Syllabic wound.
Mess and mystery: I give in.
Desire that thingness
And take it home.