Elinor: Garage Sale Stuffed Animals

The creatures are hanging out in this star composite world, and they decide to go outside. So they take a fern vessel to a planey island where teeth grow on trees. The etching I'm working on right now is the animals on the fern vessel sailing on the star ocean, and coming upon the plant island. It’s fun plant research.

ZOE: Can you tell me about your collections?

ELINOR: I mostly collect things that I think would be useful. So I...no, that's not really true. I collect weird things, too. I have five sets of boxing gloves. 

Z: Where do you get boxing gloves?

E: Garage sales. Most of my stuff is from garage sales, or Bargain Barn. I've been going to garage sales since high school. I have little stuffed animals. One of these is a stuffed animal from when I was small and the rest of them are other people's stuffed animals. There's this one Teddy Bear that I found that I just thought looked so sad. 

Z: Did you get it cause you thought it looked sad?

E: Yeah! This Teddy Bear is my favorite old pair of pants that disintegrated. 

Z: You made your pants into a Teddy Bear?

E: Yeah. 

Z: Do your bears have relationships to one another?

E: Yeah. They get separated sometimes when things get rearranged in my room and then if feels a lot better when I put them all back together.

I also collect tiny instruments because I’m too intimidated to play big instruments. 

Z: Tiny instruments?

E: Tiny instruments...I have a tiny piano, and I have my little sister's old tiny guitar and I have a tiny Banjo. I have all these little succulent bits.

{Elinor points towards a corner of her attic filled with plants.}

They are mostly parts of other succulents. Sometimes some of them die, and I don’t really understand why because I treat them all the same, and the rest of them are doing great. 

Z: Are these your prints here? 

E: Yeah.

Z: I'm noticing that your Teddy Bear collection features in this print. Can you tell me about that?

When I was little my mom had a button collection, and we'd color sort it, and organize it, and make towers out of all of them, and then throw them all back in the box.

E: I started incorporating them into my drawing and then they ended up in my senior show flyer. The creatures are hanging out in this star composite world, and they decide to go outside. So they take a fern vessel to a planey island where teeth grow on trees. The etching I'm working on right now is the animals on the fern vessel sailing on the star ocean, and coming upon the plant island. It’s fun plant research. A third of the plants are made up, and another third I'm looking up online, and the last third are my own plants. 

Z: Do you consciously collect things? Is it something you know you're doing when you are doing it?

E: I have four siblings and our older cousins would bring us all their old clothes and we'd get to sift through them; and it's like a whole new wardrobe, but it's all like really weird old stuff and I love that. Also, when I was little, my mom had a button collection, and we'd color sort it, and organize it, and make towers out of all of them, and then throw them all back in the box.

One thing that I collect—that people normally think is a little bit obsessive when they find out—is I've been handwriting out all of the text messages that I get since I got a phone in tenth grade. The backs of all my sketchbooks are every text message, and time, and date, and who sent them, and if there are picture messages I draw all the pictures. Sometimes, people will ask if they can look through them, and they'll get really excited when they find themselves. Sometimes, it’s weird, cause I'll write down the really personal ones and be like, Shit, should I not let people read my sketchbook?

The garage sale thing—my friend Michelle that used to live here—that’s what we did every single weekend. Adamantly. She'd buy like really practical things. She'd mostly buy tools and I'd go to garage sales and be like, I will take all of your bouncy balls and all of your gel pens.

Z: Do you go back and look through them yourself?

E: I used to a lot more before I did as much texting. When I didn’t text very much, I'd only write down the cute ones, the good ones. It would be like a couple dozen...it would be parts of pages and not whole pages covered in text messages. Now, I can’t decide if I should write down a really regular, Whatsup? or I'm coming.

Z: If you were given limitless resources and space, how would you display your collections?

E: In shelves and boxes. I would like to have them all visible. I would like to have them all in one space. But, I um, I'd like to have more plants and I'd like to have more animals. I'd like to be able to look at everything. I'd like a lot more shelves. 

Z: Is collecting a solitary or a social thing for you?

E: It can be both. The garage sale thing—my friend Michelle that used to live here—that’s what we did every single weekend. Adamantly. She'd buy like really practical things. She'd mostly buy tools and I'd go to garage sales and be like, I will take all of your bouncy balls and all of your gel pens.

Z: Do you have a bouncy ball collection?

E: I do, but I can't find it! I used to collect absurd amounts of... do you know those water delivery services? They came with foil caps. I probably had hundreds or thousands of those foil caps. They were malleable and I always thought I'd be able to use them. They're still in my parents’ attic. I had hundreds and hundreds of glass bottles on all the top shelves in my room, also. When I moved out, my parents were like you have to get rid of these, so we just filled up the recycling…over three weeks.

Z: Did that make you sad?

E: Yeah. But I was like, I'm leaving, I can't take them all with me.

Elinor tends vegetables as a day job and pulls prints in the evenings, working mainly with lithography, linocuts and etchings. At home she likes to mess around with needle crafts, collecting abandoned toys, drawing cartoons, trying to make her room feel like a jungle, curating vintage craft supplies, hanging out in the garden with her two giant bunnies, two medium sized chickens and one very small cat.