Artistic Freedom

Remember those hand-crank penny presses you used to see in souvenir shops? The kind where you’d crank a coin through the machine and it would come out slightly elongated with a new image on one side? Providence-based artist Muffy Brandt’s been using one to create the latest additions to her Etsy shop. The results are inconspicuously pornographic, wearable cultural artifacts, “small enough to be discreet,” according to her Etsy site, “but easily a great conversation piece.”

During a recent studio visit, Muffy asked me what my astrological sign was before handing me a small box decorated with a psychedelic interpretation of the Gemini twins. Inside the box was a penny press pendant necklace imprinted with the name and dates of my zodiac sign, and, to my delight, a depiction of a teeny tiny couple having sex in the astrologically optimal position for folks born between May 21 and June 20.

“They’re from a souvenir machine from a 1960s sex shop!” she says, clapping her hands with excitement.

Muffy’s got a lot to be excited about these days. Her shared studio at the Dirt Palace (a feminist art collective in Olneyville), is stocked with colorful wares for her Etsy store – hand-dyed and screen-printed leggings, tops and children’s clothes, all patterned with her original op-art inspired designs. When I visited, she’s just returned from the Bust magazine craft fair in Boston, where she says it was nice to network with other self-employed crafters who were hustling in anticipation of the holidays.

As a small business owner, Muffy knows that hustle all too well. In addition to the vast energy that goes into her creative process, she also does her own photography, marketing, PR, web management, shipping and receiving (“big love,” she says, to the Olneyville Post Office), and even creates her own wooden display stands to use at craft shows. “When you’re your own boss there’s a balance between wanting to be smart and savvy, but also creating things that you have fun making and that people actually want to buy,” she says. “It’s tricky, and it’s a lot of work.”

In addition to that work, Muffy moonlights as an occasional performance artist and standup comic. If you caught any of AS220’s Foo Fest back in August, you might recognize her as this year’s master of ceremonies, a role for which she painstakingly handmade different costumes – like a glam rock garbage can and a giant paper mâché cow – to introduce each act.

A native of Pittsburgh, Muffy moved here in 1999 to attend RISD, where she studied painting, film and textiles. Lately, she says, it’s been fun to see the ways in which her fine art practice and her craft manufacturing process mutually inform one another. Last year she filmed some of the geometric screen prints that were byproducts of her Etsy creations, and eventually turned that into an animation for part of the Dirt Palace’s group show at Living as Form, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts last winter.

“I used to paint for at least as many hours a week as I print now,” she says. “So it’s nice that the by-product of manufacturing has these happy accidents and it turns back into a two-dimensional art practice every once in a while.”

This March, Muffy will have work on display at AS220’s main gallery, where the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) will host part of its annual conference. For that show, she’s working collaboratively with artist Nidal Fak- houri to print ceramic tiles using a combination of manmade inks and naturally occurring elements like co- balt and copper.

In the mean time, you can check out Muffy’s Etsy shop to view her forthcoming series of towels, leggings and skirts screen printed with more bawdy imagery, this time inspired by ancient Greek artifacts.

“You know, I do standup and performances that are sometimes lewd and sexy and tongue-in-cheek, and my prints don’t always reflect that. It’s good to have different arenas of your life fulfill different things, but if I’m going to be in the studio 40-60 hours a week, I should at least be having fun.”