One week’s work.
It was nowhere near perfect, I know that – but there’s something kind of special about your first attempt, something you can keep with you forever, something you can return to, to remind yourself how far you’ve come and why you began that particular artistic journey in the first place. Something that you can forgive the imperfections of – hey, it’s just your first try, you’ll get better.
I work far from home and spend a chunk of my evenings driving back. I had been finding it very hard to make time for polymer clay, or anything that wasn’t cooking dinner, showering, feeding the gerbils, going to bed and then pressing repeat. I was especially proud of my efforts on this one therefore, like I had defied the odds of my mundane modern life, broken through the repetition to make something, actually achieve something – and hey, something that looked at least 75% like the thing it was supposed to.
I was so close to finishing as well. The form was done – I was considering baking it, or should I texture the clay to look like fur first? Better take some pictures now, I thought, in case I end up ruining it.
I share an ill-lit ground floor flat with my boyfriend, who might have a genuine medical problem when it comes to the part of the brain that manages spatial awareness.
“Don’t knock this,” I warned him, as I fixed the tail to its butt and cordoned off the lightest nook of the lounge to take some pictures for posterity.
Usually I don’t feel much in the way of esteem for anything I make, but this was actually not that bad. I’d display it maybe – save it from the cardboard box all my other pieces have been resigned to. I posted a couple of pictures of my progress on Instagram, asking anyone in the online crafting community who would listen what their opinion was re- texturing.
I’ll do something else for a bit, I thought, look at it with fresh eyes – so I picked up the phone to call home. My boyfriend was busy at his laptop in the kitchen, a normal Tuesday night scene, no cause for alarm.
But somewhere over the next twenty minutes of me talking on the phone he got up and walked over to the gerbils’ tank. They have a large-size ‘living world green eco habitat’; all perspex sides and a heavy wooden lid. The little buggers’ favourite call for attention is to start chewing the wooden lid. They know, I’m sure, that someone will be over shortly with the offer of a distraction – tasty or otherwise. We keep a makeshift mesh panel on top in the unlikely, (but just likely enough), event that someone manages to gnaw all the way through and decides to test how far the drop is from the roof of their tank to the floor. Its pieces of an old bird cage my mom bought once to keep an injured blackbird in for recovery, crudely held together with florist’s wire. He lifted the mesh panels off and lay them aside. I watched, but distracted, I was on the phone, this was a normal Tuesday night scene – no cause for ala-
“BE CAREFUL” I suddenly snapped as I watched him stumble backward with the heavy wooden lid in his arms, swinging it behind him as if he actually had no concept of its solidity and how that would impact on surrounding objects. At first I thought he was going to put it down on my project, but when I looked down things were much, much worse.
“I can’t believe you’ve done this.”
I started sobbing. Just sobbing – still mid- conversation with my mom, actually crying my eyes out at the events unfolding before me.
“What? WHAT?” It was my mom.
His foot was still poised like a ballerina, Super Sculpey clinging onto his heel like a flesh coloured dog turd. I couldn’t look at his face, but I imagined it to be wearing the same mixture of surprise and disgust you would expect from someone who had actually just smeared a dog turd into the cracks of the weathered skin on the underside of their foot.
I was still sobbing like a crazy person. I think it was the shock.
Rest in peace (or more specifically ‘pieces’) my first attempt at a gerbil. You were taken from me too soon – before you’d even been baked or painted. I will not have you there to refer back to when inevitably, out of frustration, I smoosh future attempts to recreate you (ironically actually recreating you)…or at least, I won’t have you there as I intended you to be…
claytastrophe 