[This article first appeared in Shuffleboil in January 2008.]
I was once given a Chatty Cathy doll. For those too young to remember - Cathy spoke when her cord was pulled. I proceeded to destroy her.
My mother had told me of a harsh-sounding cure from her childhood called a "mustard plaster", meant to stop coughs. I slathered mustard on Cathy and she never spoke another word. "Talk to me, Chatty Cathy! Don't you let go!" But she was gone. Thus ended my sole foray into medicine.
Years later I met one of Cathy's descendants at Interval Research (Paul Allen's former think tank) during a talk about the development of the Furby - another talking doll. If held, it said something nice. If ignored, it complained. The Furby which the speaker had brought along kept interrupting him in morose tones. Finally the speaker turned to the Gremlin-like toy, ripped out its batteries and went on with the talk.
Chatty Cathy and the Furby - thirty years apart on a continuum of increasingly complex and expensive toys. Give me crayons. Give me Silly Putty. Give me Play Doh, a jump rope, a real guitar.
Give me Rebekah Hope's Beasts - toys as art. Art as toy.
Much of Rebekah's work can be classified among the low- power consumption, platform-independent comfort devices known as toy animals, but it is much more than that. Rebekah Hope is a practitioner of the American crafts tradition, and an artist of note.
I met her in a coffee shop, surrounded by a tornado which turned out to be one of her sons. At the vortex, Rebekah sat stabbing a needle into a chunk of wool. Her apparently idle stabbing had purpose. The wool took on an appearance. Something emerged - eyes, paws, slumped shoulder, an expression, life. A Bear. This was my introduction to needle-felting.
Rebekah is always making something. She sews and knits and crochets and makes things out of wool the way other people doodle or shoot hoops or meditate, and has been doing so since she was a small child. Raised in a family of modest means (toys were handmade), Rebekah learned a range of skills from her parents (her mother a seamstress, her father a restoration craftsman and former leatherworker and glassblower) and her grandmothers, prolific knitters. She did it all, even tie-dying and macrame (remember friendship bracelets?). In her first job at Terra Toys in Austin, where they proudly sold "no toy advertised on television", she sanded wooden toys for painting.
Needle-felting came years later, when Rebekah was herself a mother and someone gave her a piece of wool 'roving'. The wool felt warm and alive. Just exploring, Rebekah began to poke. As she poked the wool became denser. She discovered that if she poked in a line, she got a line. A line could become a curve, then a shape. She learned how the material reacted, how to give it layers and colors, and incorporate other materials within it. Each creation starts from a pile of wool - Rebekah is influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose adherents admired works created from start to finish by a skilled individual.
Her first full-blown creation was a bird made for her middle son - his Lucky Squeeze Bird. [He - the son, not the bird - serves as a consultant on the accuracy of each animal's gender and other zoological details.] Art as Toy.
Nowadays her portfolio includes more than Beasts. This ambitious tableau, an Ark of hopeful emigrants, is based on a children's book called McMurtry's Wall. Made after the flood in New Orleans, it shows a family casting off for parts unknown in a cramped boat, because life is too hard where they are. They carry all they need - sheep, dogs, a rainbow, and each other.
Her work continues to advance in sophistication and control. The Fairy Godsister, inspired by an internet pen pal, took shape while Rebekah sat in a bar.
[Did I mention she works all the time, anywhere? Sometimes these dextrous musings result in inventions, the latest being beautifully decorated medicine bottle carriers, which make the standard plastic item easy to carry, and anonymous. Prescription meds as Art. Whose business is it what's on the label?]
It's hard to look at one of her pieces without picking it up and Toying with it. Witness the Tree of Life - one of a series, each with its own personality (and fruit).
Her creations are popping up in homes from the USA to Europe and I suppose someday I'll be staring longingly at her work through a gallery window. But I got in on the ground floor - I am the proud recipient (patron!) of a Bear. While I write, it sits on my desk - thin, tired but optimistic, digesting the dreams of the long winter, making plans for the future.
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