To SEe Or Not To See

Jackie Hamilton

Interview by L. Valena

December 29, 2022

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a poem. The first thing I noticed was the title. I'm Scottish but I live in France, so quite often I use words that are English but Frenchified. They're not actually words, but they tend to work. I wondered if the word 'badsightedness' is really a word. So I looked it up, and there were several definitions, which took me down a whole different line of thinking. I ended up in pages of some religious book, about how widowed women should be married quickly or they end up with badsightedness.

[Laughs] It's a punishment that's exacted on people?

No, it's just that the way they see things becomes bad. If they don't get married quick, things will get bad.

Oh, it's something they're at risk of that marriage staves off? Wild. So where did you go from there?

I read through the whole poem, about being in darkness, and not being able to see everything. At first I was going in several different directions. Different things that spoke to me as a person in my own life. So basically I just got all my ideas and wrote them all down. I didn't try to do anything physical for the first week. I just thought about it. I went really quite far in several different directions, and then ended up somewhere else.

Where did you end up?

With a mask. I had thought about making a mask to start with, and I ended up making a mask with eyes because it's all about seeing. I thought about all the different ways we see, and what we don't see. The writer talks about curtains in the poem, so I used an old fringed curtain to cover my face. I can see out, but nobody can see me. The main part of the mask is actually made out of an old bra. It's really beautifully stitched, and I've had it for years but never used it for anything because it has a shape that doesn't work for anyone. At first I wanted to make two huge eyes, but it didn't look right. But I thought it works well with the bra. You see it's something, but you don't know what it is. You can't really tell it's a bra anymore. 

I spent a whole day trying to put a light at the top. There's that idea in the poem of the writer being lit up, and everything else is kind of dark. I spent like six hours trying to fix some kind of light on top, with glass and plastic and wool and thread and metal, everything glue-gunned, and it just didn't work. That was like a whole day wasted!

It wasn't wasted! It led you somewhere else, right?

Exactly. I just put it all away, and went with something completely different. I ended up putting a glass ball on the top because it reminded me of a crystal ball, to see what you can see. I deal quite a bit with my dreams, and I'm interested in the liminal space where you're not awake and you're not asleep.

You said you started with many ideas. Can you tell me more about that?

The first thing that came into my head was a lampshade, covered in eyes. Then the writer talks about vegetables, so I wanted to make a huge vegetable necklace, but that didn't happen. Then I thought about a lampshade with eyes coming off of it, so they can see out. Then I went off onto glasses, and making a whole mask out of glasses. Then there was the curtain thing. I thought about making a mini theater, separate from the masks. It was a mini theater with vegetable puppets with eyes. Then I went on to mirrors, because I have a whole box of tiny mirrors that's been hanging around for years. I was thinking about smoke and mirrors, and illusions. How we can see things that aren't real, but our brains tell us they're real. Then I had this bra, and I realized it doesn't look like a bra if you put it on this way. It looks like eyes.

This is often part of my process. I start out with a lot of stuff and ideas, and little by little some things just seem to jump out. I don't feel like I actually chose anything. The writer also said they 'wayfind like a pinball... focused but not looking.' That really touched me. Sometimes I feel like I'm going somewhere even if I don't know why. But I also feel like I'm always looking. So it's not really straightforward.

It looks like you also made gloves?

Yes, I have made gloves before, so I just kind of adapted them to this project. I don't know why. I just went completely for the eye thing. The eyes I started making as a result of one of my main projects. I make armor – I call it soft armor for hard people. It's quilted, but there's spaces in it. And because I don't like to throw anything away, I started making little eyes and skulls in the spaces. So I had a lot of eyes.

Are the eyes drawn onto the fabric or embroidered?

It's free-motion embroidery. It's not drawn on first, I just go straight in with the machine. It's my favorite technique. I discovered it about eight years ago, and just haven't stopped.

Did you photograph this in black and white or is the work itself black and white?

It's all black and white, except for some little red details that don't show up in the photos. [Holds the piece up for the camera].

Oh wow! That is so cool.

Yeah, it's a really beautifully made bra. It's just a really weird shape. I don't know if it's from the 20's or something.

Isn't it interesting that breast shape changes with trends just like any other fashion element? From the uniboob to cone-shape.

Yes! This bra shapes the breast like a weird kind of beak. It makes a great mask though.

Do you have other associations with eyes or sight that you want to talk about?

I make a lot of eyes, actually. Most of my costumes have eyes on them somewhere.

Really?! Why is that?

It's just something I've always drawn. Even when I didn't know how to draw, I drew eyes. When I'm drawing a face, I always start with the eyes. There's something about the way we see the world. For example, we don't know if we see the same color. It's a really simple thing, but what I call green could be your red. It's these really silly things you can just bug on sometimes. We don't know how other people literally see things.

Right. All we know is our own version of reality. That's what we're working with.

Yeah, so I think that's pretty interesting. And they’re also quite weird things if you see them out of the head. They're great round things. And what you see goes to the back and comes out reversed. It's all very strange and complex.

Is there anything about this process we haven't discussed yet?

Well, it took me the full two weeks! What really helped was to read some of other people's advice on the Bait/Switch website. It helped me to see that everyone is different and everyone does this differently, so whatever I do, it will be alright. I really enjoyed plunging into it. I've got a lot of things which are now behind schedule, work I should have done and letters I should have written. But I just plunged into it. We've never got time for anything if we don't make it.

I love the conception of the Cadavre Exquis. We used to play it when I was a kid, and just loved it, and I've kept going. Often when people come to see me, we do it with drawings or little stories. I keep them all in a drawer and they're just great records of evenings spent with friends.

Do you have advice for another artist approaching this for the first time? It's your turn!

Do it your own way! That's all I can say is do it your own way. When I read all the other advice, there was everything and its opposite. At one point I could quite easily have started all over again, because I also went off into a whole fluorescent model thing, which I gathered materials for, and then I was like, "No! Get back to the bra!". And just play with it, don't get stressed. Whatever it is, it is, and it's going to be good.

Call Number: M64PP | M66VA.haTo

Jackie Hamilton is a Scottish self taught free motion embroidery enthusiast living in Marseille in the south of France. She seeks the weird and wonderful, loves improvisation and writes down her dreams every morning. Her favourite phrase is "Destroy Power Not People " from the group Crass, and given the choice her super power would be either teleportation or the ability to speak with animals.