craftzine.com/07/mansmith

CRAFTER

^IFOR ^{SEW NG} JOY

B Y STEPHEN L. MOSS

Danny Mansmith makes his world one scrap at a time.

Bad sewing is a really big inspiration to me,” says Chicago fiber artist Danny Mansmith, 36, who creates clothing, accessories, soft sculpture, and drawings in his Northwest Side studio.

“I walk into a thrift store and see a garment made by hand that’s really badly made. I think ‘They didn’t know what they were doing, but they still needed to make this.’ That sort of fire, that’s what it’s all about for me.”

Much of Mansmith’s work incorporates fabric scraps, wooden trinkets, found objects like ticket stubs, and old photographs. “My grandma was one of my biggest influences. She was a big dumpster diver. She worked as a housekeeper in the wealthy neighborhoods, and sometimes I would help her out. After her shift was over we would walk the alleys, finding things the rich people had thrown away. She would find a chair and reupholster it herself. She would find a frame in the garbage and make a picture to go in it. Her whole house was all found and made things.”

Mansmith, the sensitive redhead who was picked on in school, felt shunned by mainstream society. Inspired by fiber-artist friends, he decided to create his own wardrobe as an expression of his identity. “I bought the cheapest sewing machine I could find and immediately started taking apart all my clothes and following the patterns. I think I burned through that first machine in about a month.”

Eschewing classes and how-to books, Mansmith learned his art by studying the homemade and

vintage clothes he found in thrift stores. “I wanted to make my work look sort of haphazard and naïve, with flaws, but still be well made,” he says. “It took me most of the 90s to figure out how to do that.”

Mansmith began showing his work in 1999 and opened his own studio in 2005. “It’s a balancing act,” he says of making his art a business. “I do this because it’s my joy. But I have to figure out a way to make some money and feed myself.”

He sells his work on Etsy, and has shown in galleries from New York to Florida. He was recently chosen to design custom panels for design giant Herman Miller’s 2007 Neocon display. “I rarely find myself with nothing to do these days,” he says.

Mansmith calls his process “improvisational” and champions a jump-first-ask-questions-later attitude. “Don’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t do this because I don’t have money to buy the right paintbrush or the right canvas.’ When I started painting I didn’t have a canvas, so I took the labels off soup cans, gessoed them together, and painted on that.”

Mansmith doesn’t agonize over the details of his materials or his process, or spend time worrying about what the rest of the fiber art world is doing. “I just make things that make me happy.” ×

See more of Mansmith’s work at scrap-dannymansmith.squarespace.com.

 

Stephen L. Moss tunes pianos, fixes harps, and writes about interesting stuff from his home in Milwaukee, Wis.

Photograph by Anna Knott