CM: What else did you wanna ask?
HB: I wrote artist - wearable art… kind of the way that you pair your colours together. And OHS oil pastels / breathing and fabric fibres which we spoke about the last time, and I hadn’t thought about that before. You don’t work with oil pastels anymore?
CM: I do sometimes. Soft pastels I don’t use anymore. That’s something I don’t want to fuck with.
HB: I never thought about your industry and the dangers. You should add danger money into the costings.
CM: Yeah, it is a liability! I remember a few years ago when I first started painting murals I had an accountant, and she said to me ‘oh you’re painting murals? You better watch out breathing in all that house paint everyday’ and I was like ‘it’s not oil paint?’ and she said ‘it’s still a fume!’. I got really anal about it for a little while, making sure all the windows are open. I was using house paint to paint stuff in my studio and have a little fan going or something, but I don’t really know if that’s an issue. I haven’t looked into it.
HB: I guess just factoring health insurance into your work. The other thing I wrote was paying yourself. The last time we caught up when we got matcha this was the type of discussions we were having.
CM: Yeah, maybe you were talking about how you’d just –
HB: – I’d raised my prices.
CM: Yeah to pay yourself more.
HB: To be able to pay myself *laughs*
CM: Wow respect!
**Both laugh**
HB: I’ve been thinking about everything in different ways [lately]. Productivity, time, what is success - which I think we have spoken about before - I think of success as if I’m happy?
CM: Yeah, but actually the successes come from the failures as well. I always have to remind myself that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad drawing’. The bad drawings always inevitably lead to something better.
HB: Yeah.
CM: Even just getting the bad drawings out you’re kinda getting the crappy stuff out of the way, pushing the initial thoughts out to get to the better stuff, hopefully.
HB: But that’s also why you need to have that really sacred, special playtime that’s just for yourself - and not to share that stuff. I can look back on any garment when I make it for myself and remember the first time I bound something, and then it ended up being in the Daise Vest and the Daise Dress, I bind all the armholes and then the Tuxedo hem I made in a garment for a friends’ wedding and that ended up being a product.
CM: It all leads to something.
HB: It’s all letting yourself work and expand your knowledge, with your practice, with yourself. Not for anyone else.
CM: I also know that failed drawings or bad drawings are always an intrinsic part of getting to a final good.
HB: Do you directly take parts out?
CM: Do you mean edit as I go?
HB: If you have a drawing that you think of as being the ‘bad drawing’ and then your final thing can you see –
CM: Definitely!
HB: Maybe it’s the colour palette that’s transferred or something
CM: Yeah the colour palette, or most of the drawing isn’t great and then there’s one really beautiful line and then that gets transferred over. My drawing process as well is very - like I do a lot of iterations. I’ll start with a rough sketch, and if I’m drawing on paper I’ll put of tracing paper on top and I’ll draw over or if I’m on the computer I’ll open a new layer on photoshop and lower the opacity of the one below and draw over it. So, with each version or drawing, even if I’m using a reference image to start with, I find the more you redraw it and the further away it gets from the initial reference or drawing the more it becomes its own thing. I very rarely draw something perfect the first go.
HB: I love that. Do you think that feeds then into muscle memory? Because I love the development and I’ve learnt to be kinder to myself, I don’t look at something and think ‘that’s bad’ coz I can objectively look at it as a process. If I am making something for someone, and I know it has to be good for them, whereas if I’m just making something for myself I can be like, 'this is so fun, what a process'.
***Carla pulls out painted up-cycled swing tags to bookmarks ***
CM: These were really fun for me, I went through a bit of a process myself with them.
HB: Yayyy!
CM: I allowed myself to play, I guess, and I was thinking about your palettes. I have a penchant for primary colours and I know you’ve been into them.
HB: Look at my house!
CM: So I honed in on the blue and red, and also a pastel pink. But I wanted to use up old misprints and old sketches and stuff that I didn’t deem to be good enough, and I’ve cut them up and I’ve repurposed them to be collages - and I usually don’t even collage. But the way that I got to the collage outcome, was I thought I was gonna paint them using house paint. But then I found that even three coats of house paint couldn't cover the handwriting and so I thought, okay I have to put something else over this. And so I started ripping up these ink drawings that I’d done the day before and placing them over the handwritten bits, and they became these mini compositions. And it kind of made the paintings heaps better. I wasn’t feeling great about the paintings I guess but it also had this spontaneity and I could use my intuition like getting dressed or whatever. Just play with colour combinations and shapes until it felt right and then move onto the next one. And because they’re so small and there’s so many of them, I think there’s like twenty seven. They became this tiny body of work and I felt really excited about it.
HB: They’re so good.
CM: And also - you’re gonna love this! I was trying to do personal work that day, and it wasn’t really working and I thought - right I’m gonna do these tags - and so I put some paper down on the ground and I sat down and I put my headphones on, and I just started. I had my shoes off, and you know, getting messy! And I got really in the zone, two hours just flew by and at the end I felt so much better. It was like therapy.
HB: Oh my gosh. They’re so beautiful.
CM: Yeah, I wanted to use paper as well so that you can draw, and add your handwriting to the paper.
HB: The back is so sick.
CM: I love the backs. There’s little photos from my Iceland trip I went on in 2016, I made a zine after I went and I had a few misprint pages that I reso printed that I’d been meaning to do something with.
HB: Wow, I love that there’s stories kind of across them as well. You could look at a few and see the stories, but they’re also really unique. Wow, they’re so special. Did you keep one?
CM: No I didn’t.
HB: You should keep one as a bookmark, or put it on the fridge.
CM: There’s different opacities with different cards as well. So some are one coat of house paint, others are thicker because that’s when I was trying to cover the handwriting.
HB: What do you mean when you say house paint?
CM: Dulux house paint coz that’s what I use to paint murals. And I’m actually not really a painter, I have gouache paint, and watercolour but I don’t really have a set of acrylics. So whenever I paint panels and things I just use the house paint! Coz that’s acrylic paint.
HB: And you’ve already got it.
CM: I’ve got heaps. I need to use it up.
HB: I also love that this was something that I collected back from my stockists [when I had my price increase] and it’s something that someone might’ve thrown out but I was like no I’m gonna create something beautiful out of it, and then you have used [up your own stuff].
CM: I thought that you would have piles -
HB: Well you can see!
CM: - of extra material.
HB: Which is what this has become *shows patchwork coaster made from scraps*
CM: Yes! I was thinking about you making scrunchies out of patchwork seersucker and stuff and I was thinking about those as I was making this, and I hoped that you would feel the parallel.
HB: YES! That was what I was thinking, I wanted to send them as a bookmark for customers orders, and that’s why the scrunchies were great because I didn’t make them to sell them so there was less pressure to make them ‘good’ because it was a gift. It was something I was enjoying the process of. And also hoping to make people see the parallels and the process. And the offcuts.
CM: It’s giving them a new life.
HB: So here is two things that could’ve ended up just in the bin, being thoughtful again.
CM: Yeah definitely. And even that paint, I think I finished off one of the smaller tins that I have. One of the reds, and I was like ‘cool, that’s one less tin sitting on my shelf!’
HB: I have so many little bits. Every book has like three random cards in it. Coz I like to keep the place and think about it and go back.
CM: I do the same. Random scraps.
*** Both try to choose a bookmark for Carla to keep***
HB: Did you finish them and think of any as being your favourite, or did it take you a while.
CM: It took me a while.
HB: You had to look through them [collectively] and think 'ooh I like that one.'
CM: Well actually I was a little worried about halfway through. And then my problem solving was thinking what could I do to patch this. And I literally patchwork-ed them!
This conversation was recorded in Holly's home studio amongst coffee and pastry. 11th of April, 2024.
Photos by Amber Fletcher in Carla's studio. Read part 1 of this chat.
