Employee of The Month: Felt Artist Lucy Sparrow Re-Creates Chip Shops, Bodegas, Porn Shops, With All The Inconvenient Details
With photos by Halopigg Art and sewyoursoul.com
From a distance, the storefront appears as a nondescript convenience mart, tucked underneath the Standard, High Line hotel in New York City’s Meatpacking District. Yet close inspection reveals something else entirely: hundreds of felt sculptures, all emulating the products often sold in corner stores across the city. This is the work of Lucy Sparrow, self-described “feltist” and installation artist who concocted the all-felt 8 ‘Till Late project.
The Bath-born artist has been working within textile art for more than a decade. It was “The Cornershop”—the original incarnation of her signature felt storefronts set in her native England—that first garnered her international attention. That was 2014, and the then twenty-eight-year-old started to evolve the concept into what viewers find today in 8 ‘Till Late: Thousands of products have been created for the space, from rolling papers and pizza to cleaning supplies and Astroglide. New Yorkers will recognize a special attention to detail, a product of Sparrow’s study of local bodegas.
That knack for textile work started in the artist’s early years in Bath. “I’d always been fascinated with sewing but didn’t necessarily have the diligence or ability to follow the rules that came with fashion design or dressmaking,” Sparrow says, in an interview with Hi-Fructose. “So there were a large number of badly-made clothes for my toys when I was growing up. I remember being obsessed with designing toys and wishing I had the ability to make the stuff I was dreaming up. I remember writing to the makers of plush toys with my ideas and occasionally, they would write back. Well, they obviously weren’t as convinced as I was of my ‘great ideas’ so I kept making stuff until I got better.”
She turned to felt for pragmatic reasons. It’s difficult to imagine the work exhibiting the same tone or aesthetic using any other material. But in the beginning, other realities took priority: “Felt was the one fabric in Bath Guildhall Market that you could get in tiny sheets for (twenty pence),” she says. “So by default, that became my material of choice. I loved the way it didn’t fray, came in so many bright colours and was pretty malleable for a determined eight-year-old. I’d been drawing, painting and making things out of paper-mache like any kid does when they’re little but I love it so much. I always knew what I wanted to be. I just didn’t know how I was going to go about it. So i just kept making stuff in different media and traipsing round galleries in my home town with examples of my work hoping that someone would recognize what I was doing and instantly sign me up to their gallery. I soon realized that this was not how the art world worked.”
So I just kept making stuff in different media and traipsing round galleries in my home town with examples of my work hoping that someone would recognize what I was doing… I soon realized that this was not how the art world worked.”
As soon as the show opened, it felt like I was on holiday because working the show is a piece of cake compared to the production stage.”
Yet, Sparrow persisted. And although her work has continued to rise in reputation, the actual day-to-day process of creating the items that populate these stores is laborious as ever (if not moreso) to meet the demand for her thousands of products. When asked what this all really looks like day to day, she offers some insight: Most days, she rises at 6:45 a.m., her assistant soon arriving, and “sticks the kettle on.” The artist lives in a caravan parked outside of her studio, so she says it’s really just “a case of rolling out of bed and into a pile of felt.” They work until around 4 p.m., and then between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., the artist begins to paint. She says Netflix has been her prime accompaniment for these slots, for absorbing selections to aid productivity. “Throughout the day, we listen to true crime podcasts, brit pop, ‘80s power ballads, pretty much anything you can sing along to,” she says. “If there’s a massive deadline, I unleash the disco playlist, but that’s only for emergencies because it can make you go a bit mental.”
The products haven’t always been so everyday. In the past, she’s fashioned far more exotic objects: dynamite, gasmasks, grenades, machine guns, and blades in a weapons store; and whips, vibrators, penis enlargers, and buttplugs in a sex shop. But the diversity and sheer number of different products in her current stories are on a far grander scale. In another interview, the artist has called her work a “soft recreation of everyday life” or the makings of an “alternate universe.” But it’s meticulous work, creating each singular product: All of the pieces of fresh fruit, the rows of VHS movies and cassette tapes, all depicting the well-known real cover of cult favorites, self-help books, all of that Spam, each of these items come at the cost of cramping and long stints in the studio. 8 ‘Till Late has brought the biggest physical challenge for the artist yet, compared to her previous efforts. “I think I wasn’t prepared for how much my hand would hurt from all the painting,” Sparrow says. “I felt like some kind of athlete from all the lifting and running around. I was constantly working through lists, putting out metaphorical fires, and shifting piles of stuff from one room to the other. As soon as the show opened, it felt like I was on holiday because working the show is a piece of cake compared to the production stage.”
Back in June, one Huffington Post piece priced the entire store at $500,000. But it’s more fun to take a look at the labels for each singular felt work: $35 for a slice of pizza, $50 for a can of Guinness, or $60 for a copy of The Matrix. In the real world where these items are their real counterparts, visitors would scoff. But for a piece of Sparrow’s world and memories, the prices inside 8 ‘Till Late feel like a bargain. The economy of what she’s doing—in a philosophical sense—is at times reduced to some send-up of capitalism. “I think the one that annoys me the most is when my work is described as a criticism of consumerism,” Sparrow tell us. “It’s definitely about consumerism, for sure, but it’s always been meant in a distracted emotional response to wanting and needing things to escape real life.”
If there’s a massive deadline, I unleash the disco playlist, but that’s only for emergencies because it can make you go a bit mental.”
The other misconception of her work—one that seems to come with the territory of felt and other forms of textile or craft art, is that it’s somehow supposed to be speaking directly to children. Each of the fruits, with their cute, cartoonish eyes, may offer that impression for some. But Sparrow’s work is decidedly something else entirely: a form of escape. “This is probably not going to come across very well but honestly,” she says, “I never made my work to be kid-friendly. It was always meant to be regression therapy for adults who missed out on being kids or who wanted to relive some of the more fun times in their lives. I was a bit of a messed up kid in many ways and took everything very seriously, so I think the combination of both of those issues has made the work what it is today. It’s a dark outlook with hyperactive optimism and manic drive.”
Furthermore, today’s children likely don’t understand the nostalgia induced by this rendition of the bodega itself, a relic of 1980s and 1990s commerce. It’s from the days of Bazooka gum. Each of the film and tape covers, product labels, and magazines are callbacks to a different time. And this past summer, 8 ‘Till Late proved that New Yorkers felt a kinship to Sparrow’s work. The show had to close nine days early, after selling all nine-thousand of its handstitched products. The initial opening saw quick sell-outs for Heinz Ketchup, Vagisil, Reese’s cups, JIF Peanut Butter, and Moet Chandon champagne. But then, everything else followed out the door. (Unfortunately, one felt mouse was stolen out of a dirty bucket in the back. Shoplifters.)
Sparrow’s work seems to have this effect all over, in New York, London, or Scope Art Fair in Basel, where her work was recently displayed by Lawrence Alkin Gallery alongside Damien Hirst, an active influence on the artist.
When asked how her early days still influence the work she’s exhibiting across the world, Sparrow offers this reflection: “I was raised in Bath, my parents were pretty liberal with me and my sister so we grew up pretty kooky,” she says. “Being the weirdo in a strict boarding school does however make you a bit of a target. So naturally, I experienced about every single difficult part of being a teenager you can think of. So much of my work has come out of that time and I longed to escape everything associated with it. It’s maybe not obvious from the outside, but everything I make has weird, funny little meanings and memories.”
And as for Sparrow, she’ll continue to roll out of her caravan and into her studio—that alternate universe where her memories and imagination dwell, becoming ever more populated with inhabitants. And tiny felt bottles of Astroglide.*
Lucy Sparrow’s latest installation/exhibition is Bourbon Street Chippy in London.
This article was originally including in Hi-Fructose Issue 45, which is now sold out. Support our independent publication and get a subscription to Hi-Fructose here!
Carson Davis Brown’s “Mass” project puts site-specific, color-based installations in big box stores and other “places of mass” without permission. These visual disruptions take otherwise disparate objects and groups them into temporary sculptures. The project has taken the artist to stores across the U.S. A primary charge for the project is to make passers-by more aware of their environment by recontextualizing the items around them.
Belgian-born, Stockholm-based artist Carsten Höller creates interactive installations that reimagine the functionalities of commonplace objects and spaces. His recent piece for Gagosian Gallery at Frieze New York invited viewers to enter an Alice in Wonderland-inspired room where gigantic, textured mushroom sculptures hung over their heads.
Os Gemeos started their year off with an installation that has become part of the permanent collection of Museu Casa do Pontal in Rio de Janeiro. The twin artists created a sculpture inside of a concrete, military-style bunker featuring one of their signature characters. They painted the walls of the structure with images of a crumbling city. While the imagery evokes Brazil's growing poverty problem, Os Gemeos created the work as a response for the current state of Museu Casa do Pontal, an important folk art museum on which endless construction projects have encroached. The bunker, created in collaboration with Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos, symbolizes a fortress protecting the museum's art collection and legacy.