The artist speaks with Alma Feigis about abandoned objects and their imagined pasts, the guiding hand of the women in her family, and the unresolved tension between labour and pleasure in the act of making.
I have never been more curious about an artist’s studio than I was about C. Mae Bloom’s. To enter her world of small, charming objects feels like attending a table-top church sale in childhood. The knick-knacks are acquainted, familiar to both you and one another. You long to be part of their conversation, to hear the gossip, to know what they’ve seen. There is always more to be rummaged through, more details to notice and piece together.
Not long after I push aside the crocheted curtain into her studio, sit across from her on a foldable chairs, and begin recording, Mae brings out a plastic teddy-bear-shaped box of colourful Kinder Egg toys.
Alma Feigis: Oh!
C. Mae Bloom: I’m not emotionally or spiritually ready to put them in a work. They’re my Kinder Egg toys and no one else’s.
AF: Will they find their little ways into a piece at all?
CMB: Maybe I’ll cast them eventually. Now that some of the work is selling, I’m totally fine with not owning it anymore – it’s almost a relief. I don’t typically live with objects like this. This is my work. I have trinkets of course, but there has to be some boundary. You turn into a bit of a hoarder otherwise, and the objects become too attached to you. I find it too hard to let go. There are little bits that are my own that might end up in a work, if it’s exactly the place they should be.
AF: When it’s the end of the cycle of their life with you. What have you been working on at the moment?
CMB: The main project has been reorganising my studio, but I want to start making some dioramas, where things have edges rather than being endless. I love making these tablescapes and constellations of objects that have no boundaries and could go on indefinitely, but I’d like to see if I can make some things with defined lines.
I’ve just come out of school, so I’m still in the habit of theorising my own practice, but not so in love with the idea of it. I’m trying to take a new approach where I think about the situations and sensitivities of objects by writing about situations that produce sensitivity, somewhere between narrative short stories and anecdotal writing. I want to write a short story about storage lockers. I’ve spent a lot of my life with half my possessions in them; right now, most of my things are in a storage locker in West Somerset. It’s helping me untangle my art practice, because for ages it felt like I wasn’t trying to do anything. I’d just find things, put them next to each other, and see what happens.
AF: The storage locker idea is great, thinking about how these objects belong to you, but there’s this distance. How you treat objects is quite light and playful, with a childlike quality. How do you feel about that term?
CMB: “Childlike” can mean a lot of things. I think people are talking about something unrefined, or a relationship to objects that they could only relate to at a time when they weren’t performing themselves as a particular cultural or identified being. These are objects that you relate to without performance.
AF: You also draw from familial craft traditions. What was your relationship to making as a child, and how did home cultivate your attitude towards found objects?
CMB: I’m from a pretty proletariat household, as you can imagine. We don’t have much regard for hierarchies of materials. It goes back quite a few generations; my mum was an amazing craftsperson with pretty much anything she took her hand to; she would construct cardboard box tool organisers for her ceramic tools, but she didn’t actually like doing ceramics – she just liked making cardboard boxes. Then, my grandma was a textile worker – a pattern cutter in the textile district of London. It keeps going back like that with various technically-skilled roles. The attitude was very much, Why would you buy something when you could make it, even if it meant making a slightly more rubbish version of it.
As much as I’ve tried to avoid making work about my mother and grandma, they are very much present in there, guiding my hand. These creative, talented, skilled – though weird is the most operative term for them – and sometimes difficult women who had difficult lives, and who didn’t find it easy to relate to the world they were forced to inhabit. Enough time has passed that the world has evolved so that I can exist comfortably within it and make things for my own pleasure, for making’s sake, they never got to have that. I’ve always made things for no reason, although I wasn’t very good at it; I was never formally skilled at anything, but I just liked art and kept making it. Thought it was more about the playful narrative of the objects and how they’d sit next to each other in my world than the things themselves.
AF: I think that paying attention is a talent in itself. Noticing objects that work together in these small forms is an extraordinary thing.
CMB: I think a lot about how anyone can do this and how it’s just a skill you develop, but who would spend the time to? You can be really effective at any given task if you give it the hours and the respect it deserves, and you can say that about almost anything. I don’t believe there’s such thing as “unskilled” labour. It’s just a line we use to ignore and discard things.
AF: Yes, in much the same way that other people discard objects that you pick up and treat as valuable.
CMB: They could be valuable or not, but in this position, I think they have meaning. Everything has that potential and capacity, which is overwhelming sometimes. I’m a bit older than people usually think I am – I’m thirty-three – and when I was becoming culturally aware at ten or eleven, things like Vice and the first round of indie sleaze were popular, and everyone was into irony. You had to have this distancing from everything you felt. I like it because it’s ugly, but I don’t actually like it. No, I just like things! Things are beautiful and wonderful and interesting. We live in a terrible world, so we can just like things sometimes.
AF: What is your process for collecting these objects, and do you form relationships with those whose lives they come from?
CMB: I never know what I’m looking for, but I always know what when I find it. Things can exist in my orbit for a while – in my studio, in these various boxes – before they make their way into work. I like making poetic assumptions about objects from the situations I find them in, and forming imaginative relationships with their past owners. My favourite place to find things is a house clearance stall, because then I can imagine that they came from the same person. It doesn’t need to be true; some objects just need that narrative, even if I encountered them on the ground.
AF: Borrowers opened very soon after Moments before seconds after. How do those two shows relate to one another?
CMB: I see my practice in general as being about time – how it’s imposed upon objects, and how feelings attach to them by owning them. Moments before seconds after was a measurement of time as distance. That was a separate body of work, about buildings and movements of culture, from modernism to Stonehenge, as well as about craft. Borrowers is a more personal show, but it’s also more about other people. There’s the imagined hand of others in a lot of the things I’m doing there.
AF: You can sense that about the show – that the work connect lots of different stories and references together. Are you thinking about this when arranging the objects?
CMB: There’s a literary device called a narrative constellation, where you use fragments of a story to give wider contextual relevance. I’m quite obsessed with Olga Tokarczuk in general, and in her book House of Day, House of Night, she switches between writing about the lifestyle of a saint, the story of a small Polish town, and a lady who’s a wig maker but also a vampire. That’s an important technique that I try using in my work. I borrow the term “constellations” not because it’s about space, but because that’s what I’m doing with the object arrangements.
AF: That’s so nice. It’s just relations, really, which is also what makes up most of life. You’re just finding and guiding these little objects into relationships.
CMB: Yes. I don’t always have a wider narrative, but I feel it sometimes emerges through the presence of things near each other. I collect quite a lot of other people’s not-very-good-yet-charming craft projects, which I position next to my own. I’m the eternal amateur, the professional hobbyist – I switch crafts a lot. I’m quite good at some of them at this point, but mostly terrible.
AF: What are some of your current endeavours?
CMB: I’m very into metalwork, but I’m not good at it; I’m experimental and constantly misbehaving, like, What would happen if I painted my bronze with nail varnish? What if I colour it in with a felt-tip pen?
AF: An explosion?
CMB: It doesn’t explode, and it even looks good! Those were the metal works upstairs in Borrowers.
AF: That’s amazing! You’re having so much fun, and it’s just working with you.
CMB: I was taught by incredibly skilled, interesting, and technically knowledgeable jewellers, and jewellers are incredible because they have the ability to make things perfect when they want to. When I met these technicians, I was intimidated by their precision, but it also made me want to sometimes not do things right. I learned how to do things well enough just so there isn’t someone always looking over my shoulder.
AF: It makes so much sense that you were taught by jewellers. Those works upstairs are like jewellery for the walls.
CMB: Jewellery and decorative metalwork are fascinating. They have this parallel symbolic history that oftentimes, in the fifteenth to eighteenth century, was far more driven by beauty and decoration than the paintings or sculpture of the period. Those were embodiments of power or of the church. Then there’s contemporary jewellery and people like Lisa Walker, whose work sits between sculpture and jewellery. At some point, when does it stop being jewellery and start being a small sculpture? Where do these demarcations end and begin?
AF: I wanted to speak about the work list for Borrowers. It’s like this monumental scripture, and it’s quite poetic. I love how much verbal detail you place on everyday materials. What made you decide to make this list, and how do you come up with the titles for each work?
CMB: The only thing I ever demand for exhibitions is that I need a long, precise material list. The objects in the show, that’s all they are! I don’t think they’re magical, or that they’re the ultimate, platonic ideal of anything; all they are is the things they are. It’s where the meaning comes from. There are times when the objects come to me in boring ways – I just buy them in a shop – but sometimes they come to me in interesting ways, and I talk about that in the list as well. Titles should be a tiny windows into something, and a material list can also operate as that window. It’s a battle between what’s more important for me – to tell people what the objects are through the list, or to tell them people what they mean through the title. It’s nice to suggest something of what the object means to me to help justify it.
AF: You do that well – your titles do feel like suggestions. Which one is your favourite?
CMB: Future proof is a good name. That was a pile of doilies. I’m glad I called it that.
AF: What does a day in your studio look like, and how much of your practice happens outside of it?
CMB: I need built-in wandering time each week where I just look around at the world, because otherwise the work becomes too much about itself. The outside world is where I encounter meaning and collect things. I then bring that into the studio and try to understand what that meaning is. I’ll come here and have ideas about objects I’d like to put together, and come up with a vague plan for what I want to collect. But the minute I arrive with this plan, there’ll be nothing that I want to do less – I’ll do anything to avoid it. I make things out of papier-mache or sew, most of which don’t end up in the work, but it’s good for me to think. That’s when the interesting things usually occur, but it’s not an accident. It’s this purposeful experimentation that I allow to have space to see what happens.
I also have this sheet of wood that I put on the floor, onto which I put objects that I don’t understand yet. They accidentally end up next to other things, so then I’ll be working on making things to bridge gaps between them, to make them talk to each other.
AF: You’ve lived in quite a few different places, and since much of what you make comes from your surroundings, how has the work changed since moving to London?
CMB: There have been quite a lot of clear physical changes. The work has become more… “sharp” is the wrong word, because there’s not much that’s sharp about me. I think it has become less interested in my own taste or a particular aesthetic rationale, and more in understanding how they deal with objects that they own. There’s been a lot more of a relationship to how people live and the activities people do in private, like collecting a bunch of string for years, or creating a giant rubber band ball while bored at work. Maybe some of that comes from being in a lot closer contact with people and living with strangers, and being curious about how their lives are lived. It’s very different to how I’ve lived before.
AF: What’s your dream setting for a show?
CMB: I would like to work in a space where I would be reacting to things that are already there and be there for a while before I propose the show. The hardest thing about making exhibitions for me has been deciding the underlying structures and display conventions. I’m much better at reacting than I am enacting or imagining – but I would love to have a show in a village hall.
AF: I see that, with worn wooden floors and funky curtains. How did you decide upon the exhibition design for Borrowers?
CMB: There are four distinct bodies of work going on there. Upstairs, there’s the clock piece and those bronzes. The clock piece is weird. There are two different polarities: optimism and pessimism, and industry and hobby.
AF: I loved the one with the small bell attached, ticking around and letting out a small ring as it falls. I didn’t realise you saw that as one installation.
CMB: Yes, it’s probably the biggest thing I’ll ever make! Each part of the work sits where it relates to those four subjects, these axes. I was thinking then about who gets to enjoy craft. How has craft been commodified? How do we use hand-made things in our day-to-day lives, and what’s the invisible labour behind that? No one’s building a machine to put glitter on decorative Christmas holly – it’s being made in a sweatshop by an exploited workforce. A lot more things have the presence of a human hand than we feel comfortable admitting.
Being an artist has subsumed everything else for me, but for most people, the way you make your living is not the great meaning in your life. That’s absolutely fine. That’s how you get through it – you do your drudging economic labour and find small moments. Your meaning is in what you do in between going to work, like the relationships you build and the things you do for no reason – building model train sets, or making jumpers, or reading books. But we’re in a weird situation where hobbies and leisure themselves are now encouraged to operate as a hustle. I crochet and knit a couple of hats each year, and people suggest that I sell them. I don’t think they realise that for me to make minimum wage, I’d have to sell them for more than I’d sell a sculpture. I mean, I’m not very fast at crochet, and I like expensive wool!
AF: And those low, baby pink round tables downstairs? I like how the display feels non-categorical rather than indexical, like you might expect.
CMB: Those tablescapes are the amoebic state of the work. The objects there are ones that I understand just a bit, or sometimes not at all, and which require some sort of narrative synthesis; I know there’s something in them, but they need a more imaginative reading. I wanted to do something there that was reminiscent of how an object would exist in a home, where you just place it somewhere and let it gather dust. I wanted it to feel very casual, even though there is nothing casual about it.
Then the shelf piece is other people’s collections. I know those objects came from a person who collected and valued them for a reason, so they already interesting and mean so much. I don’t need to add anything – all I have to do is use my authority as a sculptor with far too many degrees to declare them as art.
AF: Are these both singular installations in your mind, or various sculptures that are part of a series?
CMB: This is a big question in my practice that I’m still trying to understand for myself: what actually is my work, and at what point does a constellation of small, individual sculptures become a single, bigger work? Maybe it can operate in both ways.
