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Shae Bishop | Episode 613
Shae Bishop earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. Shae’s artwork explores the relationships between ceramics and textiles. Shae has been a resident artist at The Archie Bray Foundation, Red Star Studios, and elsewhere in the US, as well as in Indonesia, Turkey, and Hungary.
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Where do you start when you first begin making a garment?
Well, I always start by doing a ton of drawings. Drawings, sketches, designs on paper are a lot of fun for me and they are also where I get to work out all of the kinks before I start investing in making the tiles themselves. I will always drop a number of possible designs in different formats and then I start doing color studies. Once I get to a place that I like I will make a bunch of copies of my black and white sketches and I will start coloring them in different ways and start working out the glaze pallet I am going to work with. I do all of that before I even start making the tiles for the piece because I like to have a vision for it and a product in mind even though it is going to evolve throughout the process. Then I start making test tiles after that.
When you are drawing, are you drawing actual patterns like a tailor or are you drawing what you want the end thing to look like?
Good question. Yeah, I start off by just drawing in my sketchbook and drawing the vision for what my final product is going to look like. Then once I have the end design that I want, as I am making test tiles I start making full size paper patterns in a similar way that one would if you were making normal clothes out of fabric.
Do you break it down into specific pieces like the arm, the chest piece?
Yes, depending on the needs of the piece, I will make paper patterns for the different parts of the garment.
You also have to make them to fit you. How do you compensate for your arm length and your chest size and where it is supposed to land on your waist? How do you plan for that?
One thing that I have found in the last number of years is that it is kind of hard to find mannequins that match my body because I am a pretty slender guy and most of the mannequins that I find are these big broad shouldered mannequins and it is really helpful to have a body form to work from when you can pin tiles right onto it. It helps a lot with visualizing not to mention displaying the piece in a gallery, but one great thing that I did a few years ago was I made a mannequin of my own body. My partner and I, before we were dating, we cast our bodies in plaster and filled the molds with expanding foam. So I ended up with this form positive in the shape of my torso. Then I just upholstered it in fabric and I ended up with an exact mannequin of my own torso.
Do you have to plan for everything to be ten percent larger? Your mannequin is exact size but your clay when it starts is not the exact size.
Right! I also have a few other mannequins that are a little bit bigger than I am and those can be helpful for that. But there’s a lot of leeway in terms of exact size when I am working with clay because there is a little spacing between the tiles as I am lacing them together and when I am getting to the final construction stage if I need to add a little space somewhere I can just add in a little row of one inch tiles if I need to. If I need to taper in I can do a dart, so a lot of the fitting comes in the final assembly.
Is there anyone out there that you can point to or look to say, I’m going to copy that person?
No, I can’t really say that there is exactly. There is a great Chinese artists named XXXX and what he does is take existing Chinese pottery and he breaks it into pieces and then puts it back together into garments and his work is really beautiful and interesting but he is not actually making the ceramic part from wet clay in the beginning.
Would you do a commission for someone? If someone said, I need a coat. Would you make it for them?
You know, I wondered if you were going to ask that. I have had people ask me that before and it is hard to make a blanket statement going forward in the future but as of right now I think I would say no because the current way that I work with these pieces is so personal and they there is kind of this self-portrait element and all those things are important to me and I am not quite ready to let that go and move to the role of tailor.
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Instagram: @shae_bishop