Teacup the Lamb

Teacup the Lamb is the first soft sculpture I was able to make after I graduated high school. She, like her predecessors, is made of found fabric and hand sewn in the same childish and sloppy manner. But she's different from the others, because where they were about joy, Teacup is about grief. 

Mike Kelley's MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN is a piece that makes me cry a little bit every time I see it. Not because of what the piece represents, but because of what happened after Mike Kelley took his own life. The piece was reclaimed and was recreated in his honor by those who loved him. People came together and turned it into an altar for him, with this unabashed sentimentality for him and his work. 

I think part of this reaction to Mike's life and work has to do with the fact that as a child I wanted to save every slightly torn stuffed animal at the thrift shop. I thought no one would take them home and they'd always be unloved. I think that habit was me projecting my own feelings of being unloved onto objects to regain some type of control. I was a very depressed kid, and I tried to seriously kill myself once in middle school by jumping in front of a train, but I was about 15-30 seconds off. Like many suicidal people, I spent a lot of time imagining how I would be mourned by others after I died.

I still have depression (I'm no longer suicidal!) and sometimes it feels like there is nowhere for that sadness to go, and that all I can do is to keep moving so that it won't catch up to me. When I made Teacup I decided to stop running, and let it stay for awhile. I made myself tea, stretched and wrote in my journal every night for 30 days. I then dyed fabric with tea and blue dye if I cried that night, then I put my thoughts into the plastic tea bags that make up Teacup's blanket. She's literally made of my grief in that way. 

Sometimes our grief is never-ending, but so too is our love, as grief is what happens when love has no place to go, we must make it a place to go so that it may turn back into love.