My Trip to Harry’s House
On Saturday the girls and I took a road trip to New York to visit the three-tiered jello mold sculpture that I made for Harry Styles’s store, Pleasing. It is the spot-lighted centerpiece of his pop-up shop, which occupies a brick and mortar building in SoHo from November 23 to December 23, 2022.
And a truly Pleasing experience it was.
We got there around 3:00 in the afternoon and it was a marketing masterpiece. A line of people stretched around the block, waiting to get in. The man at the front door said that around 400 people had been in today, around 10 at a time. There were a lot more than 400 still waiting. Someone mentioned having stood outside for four hours.
The line stretched around the block. Everybody else had to wait 4 hours to get in. We didn’t.
Not us. When we arrived I texted my contact and she got us right in. We felt like royalty. We had brought along some of my favorite people, Eric Roston and Karen Yourish and their daughter, and I’m pleased to say that I impressed them. (This is a joke. I have known these people for decades. There is no impressing them.)
The fake jello stood proudly in the middle of the coffee table, in front of a sweetly upholstered sofa where people were encouraged to take pictures of themselves to post on Instagram. It’s an interactive experience for the customer and free marketing for the company. A spotlight from the ceiling made the sculpture radiate campy warmth, and it started to get around that I was the artist who had made it. I had told one person, and about 30 minutes later, everybody in the store knew. I haven’t gotten that much love since the cafeteria ladies liked whatever I was wearing in the 1980s.
The girls and me at the most “Instagrammable” spot in the store
Everyone who came into the store took a picture with the fake jello.
Let me explain a little bit about this artwork. It is a hard yellow resin (plastic) sculpture that I make by pouring a two-part epoxy syrup into silicone molds that are really supposed to be for jello or bundt cakes. I can also add in toys or leaves or staplers… really any object that will fit inside the container. When the chemicals mix together they form hard, solid plastic around the embedded bits. When they come out of the molds it looks like the 1950s delicacy: a graceful mound of jello with bits of fruit (or staplers) floating inside. Sadly, they don’t jiggle like the real thing.
The commission to make this three-tiered tower for Harry Styles came to me in October through my Etsy shop. I had several listings of jello molds with embedded sharks and farm animals. The idea had grown out of the work I was doing with the epoxy resin in 2021, the year the Brood X cicadas infested the Eastern Seaboard: making marbles with cicada shells inside them. Hallie Slade, the producer from SLAACK Productions who was putting together Harry’s shops, saw my work and asked if I could create a large plastic version of a jello mold she had as a cartoon sketch. I said, “sure!” and a project was born.
I made three matching sculptures for Harry Styles’s Pleasing pop-up shops in London, Los Angeles, and New York
Following the picture, I filled the top two layers with bits of citrus and olives, rendered in polymer clay, and made goldfish and a shark for the bottom layer. When we got to the shop, Karen immediately found a blown glass Christmas tree ornament in the shape of the yellow jello, also based on the cartoon sketch, and I immediately bought it.
You can see the goldfish, multicolor citrus bits, and olives in this picture. The curves in the plastic make them look like they’re in a funhouse mirror.
In the end I spent almost as much money on fingernail polish, a “pleasing” towel, lip gloss, and the Christmas ornament as I made from the three pieces of heavy plastic artwork that took me three full weeks to make. And OMG, it was worth it!
Well, I know I was pleased.
Thank you, Harry! Thank you, Hallie and SLAACK Productions!