The Mermaids
The Mermaids
When we lived in North Carolina on the Intercoastal Waterway, I would run across fishing anchors at yard sales and junk stores. Because they generally sold for less than $15, I started collecting them and turning them into mermaids, by heating the cross pieces and bending them into arms. I made breasts and faces out of epoxy resin and hair out of copper wire, sometimes beading their hair and twisting it into fantastic shapes. I must have sold sixty of these babes, which were very popular as yard decorations.
Sometimes I gave them hands made of cast off silver forks; sometimes I dressed them in beaded capes. Frequently I had them holding mirrors covered in shells. Often they were very elaborate but they could be very minimalist pieces of work.
My favorite mermaid is one called Sailor’s Doom, which I could never bring myself to sell . When we left North Carolina, she and a couple of others made it into the U-Haul and crossed the country to the Left Coast. She sits on my porch in Bellingham, copper hair all a tangle, still beckoning seafarers to a watery grave. She wears a cape and snood that I created for her out of strings of sequines woven together. She’s about three and a half feet tall.
The last three mermaids are tiny creatures, standing no more than about six inches tall. They are made from nautical hooks, the kind that attached to the lines on sailboats and are used for hoisting sails. The hooks, which are welded to gears, become the mermaids’ tails.You can see that most clearly in the center figure.
