#sun likes to pretend he hated the old model but it was nostalgic to him. moon liked that it scared kids JEDKKF

[smokbeast]

They're silly! They dance!

[francisandthebirds]

1: My missing welly and a fabricated boot based on a dress I’m wearing in one of the photos of the two of us.

2: Robert Gober, Untitled Leg emerges as if a one-legged man has fallen backwards through the wall. Every detail is replicated from life, including real human hair. 

3,4: I chose a somewhat ‘iconic’ image in my family to paint from - my sister and I with tiger face paint prowling through our garden, semi obscured by a red blur, a product of the disposable camera. We wear multicoloured sun hats made from a single cord wound from the rim to the top. They have disappeared or fallen apart since. 

It is the colours of the photograph which makes it so compelling - the foibles of the photographic process giving it a strange, otherworldly quality. The way my sister and I match, in the hat and the face paint, instantly reminds me of a time when we were almost like twins, with identical copies of the same things or of single items of which we had shared ownership, and shared emotional investment. I wore my sisters hand-me-downs, of course, and I also attached myself to toys because they belonged to her, existed long before I could remember and therefore had a kind of nostalgic connection. The rainbow hats, however, belonged to both of us, neither one particularly mine or hers.  

The face paint reminds me of our ‘pretend’ games, constructing a cast of recurring characters which we inhabited interchangeably and traded depending on the whim of the moment. We, as the actors, found it perfectly logical to play the same character almost simultaneously.   

5,6: My original idea was to paint a pair of children’s wellies with Mickey Mouse like my missing welly for reference for a painting. Then the choice of wellies I was confronted with was between the above products. On principle, I refuse to give money to merchandise which, I believe, influences children to value the material goods of a brand over the stories of the original film or TV series. This is a weird symptom of the ultra-consumerism of our society. For example, my cousin, at about four years old, declared his love for ‘Iron Man’, brandishing the unimaginative figurine. When I asked whether he’d seen the film from which the figure had been copied, or read the comics... he gave me a baffled look. All he knew of the character was the branding. (In this case, probably a good thing. Besides not being age appropriate, the womanising Iron Man is not the best role model for a young male). This is hardly a new thing. I loved my Mickey Mouse wellies despite not knowing the character beyond the face on the boots. The difference, I think, is that for me, the character was just a friendly mouse. Enough was left to the imagination that I could construct a personality for him without having any context. My cousin’s Iron Man figurine was a very specific man in a very specific suit which came with information on special abilities and suitably impressive science fiction-y names. He wasn’t encouraged to imagine. 

Then there’s the unnatural binary of ‘girl things’ and ‘boy things’. Now, I’m agender, so maybe I find it more alienating than cis people, but I hate the forcing of gender roles onto children. This is worse when it is a moneymaking scheme concocted by marketing to persuade parents that their male and female children must have different things. With the above example it’s unusually subtle, but the ‘girl’s’ boot is coloured delicately in baby blue and the ‘boy’s’ in aggressive red and black. This would be fine if it were one set of wellies among a variety of differently ‘gendered’ products, but these where the only wellies I could find in the children’s section. This is an area of the shop not divided by type of clothing, but by gender. Even the shoes are separated between the ‘girl stand’, festooned in pale pinks and blues with glitter and flowers and bows, and the ‘boy stand’ with its action heroes in bright primary blues, reds and greens. All this division despite the negligible difference in body type in the sexes before puberty. This isn’t about a biological difference. It’s societal. Girls are encouraged to be docile and boys to be confident. 

This is something I care deeply about, as you can probably tell...

So, instead, I found some anonymous navy wellies from a charity shop. They were closer to adult size than a child’s and weren’t going to be a useful reference, so I re-thought my idea. I looked through my photographs for an image to paint onto the wellies and found my sister and I as tigers. To me, this is an icon from my childhood, just like Mickey Mouse's face is for so many people. The bright colours and implied narrative in the image of our faces reflects the icons of children’s cartoons and franchises. 

I recreated my missing welly with my face in the place of Mickey Mouse and then it’s pair with my sisters face. The little me is paired with a little her. Even when one shoe is lost, they are still a set, as we were in that moment.