Ramblin'

Portraits and ponderings from the writing desk of Jill Foote-Hutton.

Whistlepig Studio: The Origin Story

Whistlepig Studio, as a concept and a brand, was born in 2010 during a particularly trying time in my academic career. My gift (my curse?) seems to be that I somehow find the boundary in any given situation and push beyond comfortable societal or professional boundaries. I’m usually motivated honestly, by observation, but cursed by naiveté – my observations are processed on a very literal “if-then” level and rarely seem to factor in the limits of the human condition. In short, I have pushed too far in my life on more than one occasion. 

Pushing too far is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. 

This is how we wind up with the most magnificent discoveries. 

Pushing too far is how we develop new pathways. 

However, the thing I always seem to miss? 

The human condition, as a group or as an individual, doesn’t want someone else to take that last step for us. No one, at least very few people, are going to be grateful you went too far, especially if you carry them along in your process, however unwitting you may be. In forgetting, or overlooking, or being too naive to realize this very crucial point, any boldness I have can be quickly followed by crippling regret when the pushback comes down hard. 

Hard, equated to a disproportionate and venomous response in one particular scenario. I think I’ve spent the last decade taking tentative steps to get over the explosion I experienced as an instructor in higher education. The specifics don’t matter so much, except I will say I was advocating for my students and empowering them to advocate for themselves. We took on an authority figure we didn’t reckon was an enemy. Pushing too far revealed our enemy and, as I was leading the charge, I took the brunt of the blow. 

And here lies the “event center” of the origin story of the Guardian Monsters, because this is the time when I would struggle with my purpose. I was trying to understand how I was wrong. I was afraid to leave the safety of my home, but I did. I had recurring nightmares filled with the most disgusting bathrooms. Having never experienced recurring dreams of any kind, I now know I was worried about my worry. 

I looked up the symbolism of dirty bathroom dreams. 

It ain’t good. 

I started to do the Haka at home before I would go into work on a day when there would be a departmental meeting. The Haka is not of my culture, but the concept resonated with me, and as I mix and match most things, I also painted my face. I created a mask in private, to embolden me in public.

I felt I was at war.

 I didn’t understand why and I didn’t know what to do. 

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The solution, of course, that worked best, was turning to my drawing board in my studio. With charcoal in hand, I created large, organic outlines of random shapes. I just let all the energy and anxiety I was feeling guide my hand, drawing a heavy black outline on a wall that held a five foot by three foot piece of Arches paper, torn from a roll. Inside the outline I wrote, savagely pouring out all of my irrational and rational fears and questions. I drew with text filling up the empty space. 

In a stream of consciousness flow, the letters became aggressive texture. But, when I had filled the void, it was too bare, too revealing of my inner voice. I didn’t want an audience to read the text I had committed to paper. 

Ever

I didn’t want to preserve this raw journaling for external viewers. 

The texture of the text became the first layer of a growing palimpsest as I painted over the top of the words. Slowly, getting lost in the process of finding an image, of laying materials on top of each other, reigned in only by a self-imposed monochromatic rule, I found the first Guardian Monster. It was the bison guardian I now use as the Whistlepig logo. It is the guardian tattooed on my body. It is the guardian I use repeatedly to illustrate various narratives. It is the guardian I have clung to as we moved around the country over the last decade.  

Calling him a bison is not wholly accurate, but it is the most recognizable influence of his physical attributes. His head is improbably balanced, much larger on top than below with his eyes, nose, and mouth all crowded together at the forward-facing base of his skull. Beyond his bison-like qualities though, he has too many horns – six altogether. His mouth is circular with razor sharp teeth, like a modified lamprey eel mouth. He is mostly blue in his original guise, but he has morphed into red. I think red is his warrior color and blue is his natural color, better reflecting him as a symbol of gratitude. Red is when he is in protective mode, when he is on high alert. Of course, his mythology has evolved over the course of a decade, but this way of thinking, of creating an avatar or a spirit guide, is rooted in my upbringing and the foundation of my studio practice. 

I was raised in a religious family. Not the kind that was oppressive, but one that believes in an open, affirming, and loving god. The god-head presence was just matter of fact – much more akin to Tevyah in Fiddler on the Roof than anything else. I also grew up on a steady diet of Muppets and fairy tales. Then, when I was becoming an official “art major,” my mentor was a performance artist and showed me the works of Carolee Schneemann and Mary Beth Edelson, among others. Their work was powerful to me, spiritual, and used art to invoke invisible power that is always seated within us as individuals, even if it lay dormant. 

Imagine dumping all of these (and trust me, more of the same) into one hopper (my brain) and it all comes together in a time of crisis to realize the creation of Guardian Monsters.

Each Guardian Monster is a variation on an archetype of the human condition. Each Guardian Monster is pulled from the fearful shadows that lurk inside our minds. Pulled out of the darkness, where they can only be meddlesome MONSTERS, into the light, where we can see the gifts they have to offer. Each Guardian Monster can carry, like all art objects really, what we need them to carry – what we put on them. They are intended, at their best, to operate as ceremonial objects, which remind us to rise to our higher power.

From my studio I look out into nature and research the symbolism of the flora and fauna that surrounds the earth, region by region. I take parts from human, animal, and plants; mixing and matching to create unique chimeras. Behind every Guardian Monster-head is a narrative, a world, a purpose. While it’s not important for me to tell YOU each story, because that story can change if you decide one of the guardians speaks to you, I do like to create digital collages sometimes with their visage. Again, giving the guardians a larger context. I like to write or gather flash fiction narratives to accompany the collages, another way to fill in the potential backstory of their existence. 

I also like to facilitate the power of creating a personal totem in workshops, where I work with adults who may have forgotten how to call their own power into being in a healthy way. I like to work with adults who need to remember how to do that and who need the opportunity art provides to execute low-consequence, autonomous decisions. So each Guardian Monster workshop is a chance for an adult to reclaim the magic of childhood, when we could easily conjure heroes and gods out of thin air – when we could become them.

And what of the name Whistlepig? 

Well, remember the gopher from Winnie-the-Pooh? He was an outlier in the hundred-acre wood. He was helpful to the community, but he went his own way, always working diligently – never missing a break. That gopher had some balance in his life, and he knew who he was. He had a self-awareness the other characters may have lacked. 

Also, the love of my life is from Texas and he is prone to using colloquialisms, as am I, being from Missouri. He would sometimes call me “porcupine” as a term of endearment, so when he said, “You should call your studio ‘Whistlepig’,” it made perfect sense to me. I did not give it a second thought. I just said, “YES!”

A gopher is sometimes called a whistle pig because of the squealing noise they make; sorta sounds like a whistle. A gopher has nothing to do with a bison. A bison has nothing to do with a lamprey eel. Somehow, when disparate parts are brought together, our minds miraculously create meaning. Depending on how serious you take the history of totems, which has a long and storied past (see: wishbones, worry stones, worry beads, four leaf clovers, feathers, bear claws, Milagros placed on altars, Nkondi figures from the Congo, rabbit feet, evil eye pendants, etc, etc), will depend on how you relate to the Guardian Monsters.

How much meaning will you give them?

So that’s that. 

And the quest, even a decade later, keeps me interested. I hope you are interested too.