Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Megan Bridge
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist, after the verbal conversations have been had.
Megan Bridge (she/her) is a designer, artist, and small business owner. You can follow her creative work, Stooludio, here or keep up to date on her freelance place-of-work work, Barter, here.
Location: Matchstick Fraser
What do you make or create?
Right now, I’m making rugs. I started a tufting practice during COVID. I’ve studied furniture and, come COVID, there wasn’t access to shops. I didn’t have the materials. I didn’t really have anything to make anything. I was living in a studio apartment, with my partner Andrew Drakeford, sharing a couch with literally our feet in each other’s faces.
There were all these beautiful shiny tools at Emily Carr that were dangled in your face, where you had to write a very eloquent proposal to even possibly get accepted to use them, and, for some reason, this tufting gun was in this room. I always dreamed that I’d use it for my grad project (which was about stools, our connection to furniture, and how that brings value). In the end, I wasn’t able to, so Andrew found that you can get these tools for quite cheap – they’re industrial guns used in factories, with cheap meaning $300 cheap – and he just bought it for me, so I could figure it out.
This was coming out of graduating into the pandemic, going through cancer, and becoming half of the person physically that I once was. I was not the most confident in those few months in a woodshop. And then I sort of picked up tufting. I was already painting, so it was a beautiful moment to incorporate a painting practice and a visual graphic practice into a more tangible homewares practice.
I had gone through so many iterations of prototyping with different types of yarn, finding more sustainable ways to source that yarn, being able to play with color. It’s been like an all-encompassing crazy passion that I never thought I would, in a million years, when people ask: “What’s your thing?” I’m like: “I make rugs.”
I feel like when it comes to craft, and skills, and becoming a master of something, you can only get so far in tufting and I don’t think I’m anywhere near that. Even if I were to make the most beautiful tufted rug, after ten years of making rugs, it's still not going to have the same long-term value as something that was hand knotted or hand woven by like, me, even. It just doesn’t have that same – I’m like shitting on my practice but – it just doesn’t quite have that same heart to it I guess, soul.
I’ve been very conscious of that side of tufting and how to challenge that and make sure that whatever I’m doing is prolonging the rug itself. To make sure I’m using, again, sustainable materials, long lasting adhesives, whip stitching, so these are solid objects.
Then, in turn, I work with my partner, and our brand Stooludio. We essentially have a lab in our house. Our garage is tufting and a woodshop, our extra room is 3D printers and plotters. He’s spearheading because he’s the computer robot brain. Right now, we’re doing crazy vases made out of 3D printed plastic.
They’re shiny and we’re taking on parametric forms, twisting and manipulating them. We’re at a stage now where we’re like OK, these are really amazing forms for flowers, or whatever, but maybe we’re going to make them into lamps, and maybe then we’re going to make them into watering cans. We’re thinking about the vessel.
Between him and I, we always have ideas and it gets almost bogged up where we’re thinking where do we even go, where’s the moment to just kick off and keep going. I think because we’re using manufacturing tools that, in theory, can produce quite a bit, we have to pick an idea and pursue it. Do a prototype. See how it feels.
At the end of the day, our practice is just fun.
What do you do to support that?
I’ve been working with Barter Design, as Kenny’s assistant in everything, which has been really interesting. I’ve been with him for about a year. Before this gig, I always served to support myself, throughout school and any sort of practice. That was guaranteed good money and flexible hours, which I really appreciated, but technically I’m a freelancer. I work for Barter pretty much all the time yet I still take on other projects. Right now, I’m designing an apron for Nemesis Coffee, and some bags for other people.
I’m always taking on projects, as much as I’ve the bandwidth for, but the really amazing thing about working for Barter is that even though they’ve been around for almost a decade based out of the Sunshine Coast, they’re still such a baby company.
Thinking about my mindset a year ago, and my brand with my partner – our crazy workshop 3D printing rug factory playhouse – I thought Stooludio maybe could be something. Even though we were still so new in our practices, still learning, we saw there’s a business model there, an opportunity.
This was during COVID. We were living off CERB. We thought we could really maybe find a way to sell either our objects or take on really interesting projects and collaborations, but I think, at the time, it was really difficult to connect with people and we’re not business savvy at all. We realized we needed to look for jobs because what we were doing, though it was fun, was not sustainable.
I got connected with Barter and serendipitously Kenny was opening a store in Vancouver, and he offered for me to just sort of be there. Andrew ended up getting an industrial job for Article so it ended up we were like two sides of the same coin working in furniture. I’m working in a completely local scale world where everything is sourced and made in the Pacific Northwest, and he’s working with the current fastest-growing furniture corporation.
Our dialogue on the furniture manufacturing world is very interesting. Of course, everyone has to be thinking about what are the next steps to be more sustainable. While Article’s scrambling to find something, I’m like, well, we’ve got it figured out. That’s a big part of what our shared practice is, what Stooludio is trying to do: localize manufacturing.
How can we do it here and now? What’s that value? It’s very nice to be completely immersed in design, working with a small business, and learning how to do that. Ten years later Barter’s still like “Wow, there’s lots to learn.” It’s never ending if you’re focusing on making here. I don’t want to say it’s a lot easier going across seas, but there are already things in place that make it easier.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
Even though Barter’s done pop-ups and had their products in other stores over the years, there’s never been a Barter shop. In a lot of ways retail is kind of dead. You’re alone in a shop, which is why all these amazing shops are popping up with ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty different artists, or designers with their things talking and being curated together. It’s a lot more special, and I think the same sentiment goes for Barter.
When you have a huge space where everything is yours it’s not as exciting. Barter’s so much about collaborating with local manufacturers, designers, and artists that we’re now using that space as a studio type environment.
There’s still a retail aspect, but now I’ll be tufting big rugs out of that space so people can come watch the rugs being made, and then being sold from there. There’ll be a painter, a ceramicist, we even have a kiln… a lot of things are going on. We’ll still have retail opportunities, we’ll bring in local makers and if they want to put in a vase in, T-shirt, or twenty candles – great!
We want to have an open-door policy yet at the same time find ways to curate. Even if you’re not involved in the retail aspect, we will have events and networking. Vancouver feels dead. We want to make a space in the city that brings some life, warmth, and connection back – especially after COVID, I think everyone really needs it.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
Time. There’s just not enough time in the world. I’m so invested in Barter. I want to see Barter succeed as much as I want to see whatever I’m trying to do with Stooludio, and my partner Andrew, succeed. At the end of the day, there’s not enough time in the world to take on the day job and work on whatever you do.
There’s my freelance job, my practice which requires a lot of thoughtful consideration even though I’m trying to be more impulsive and just kind of ‘make.’ There’s decompression time to really exercise the brain and not just the making aspect, the social aspect, talking to and collaborating with other creatives (which is again, so much about what these next steps with the Barter space are about).
We want to open up the doors and have more people working alongside each other, to be putting on monthly events where they’re bringing in their community, we’re bringing in our community etc.
Just opening all that up takes a lot of energy, and it is energy that I want, it’s energy that will fuel my practice and my creative brain. With COVID it was really hard. I just made and afterward was like: “What the heck was that?” It was good, it was cathartic, but you really do need time to read, experience the world, take long walks, let your mind wander, to hit the “Yeah!” moments. To find time for that, for relationships, family, whatever!
Constantly fighting time is probably the biggest challenge. It’s super refreshing to be so passionate about something like Barter that is very much focused on raw material, form, and no color. In my practice everything is color and wacky form that doesn’t make sense and goes against physics and logic. These two very important things, they’re not at odds. I think that’s the most beautiful part, they embrace each other so well: Barter loves Stooludio, and Stooludio loves Barter. We’re finding ways to come together and find these really beautiful moments together. I wouldn’t say they’re any real challenges except for time and energy (sigh).
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.
My latest personal project has been the Moss Series. I was thinking a lot about Barter. We work with local species – Hemlock, Cedar, Doug Fir – and I’m spending a lot of time in the forest now. I’m always identifying trees, appreciating the moss, and the growth. I see moss as nature's carpet. So, I needed to make moss rugs. I don’t know if I would have come to that without being so influenced by Barter.
Our initial collab was the rug for the shop opening. Kenny really wanted to do a rug, in grey, and I didn’t know – I use a lot of pink, and blue, and psychotic colors – but I love a challenge.
We wanted to do a grey – natural non-dyed wool – rug. He had just collaborated with Timothy Dyke, a blacksmith out of Abbotsford, they do a series called Candlestick Grove together. They’d just done a series of gong bowls – there are three different sizes and when you hit the gongs, they each have a different reverberatory sound. He was wanting to do something central, like a seed, and, fixating on this gong, the circle.
For Andrew’s grad project, Andrew had developed this script where you input sound and then that sound digitally outputs 3D forms. For the rug, Kenny would go out into the forest, hit the goings, sent me the recordings, and we put it into the program and translated it into digital space.
I played around with that a lot and found this explosive celestial kind of shape, surrounded by a circle with lots of dots going out into space. I took that, played with it, projected it onto my canvas (my tufting woven fabric), and it was presented, when we first opened the shop, with the rug hung up and the gongs on a table in front of it. One was meant to hit the gong and then feel the noise in an image. It was super successful.
Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are mixed generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
