What is Unordinary?
This website is my portfolio and home to my web-comic, “read me:” which is a jumble of unrelated nonsense that is sporadically updated at best.
I make art, comics, soft sculpture, and craft items. Sometimes I sell these items on my etsy site (www.unordinary.etsy.com). Sometimes I sell them at craft shows or art galleries. Having a portfolio online makes it easier to contact galleries about potential shows, and it allows me to share my work with friends, old and new.
A rant about the website name:
Regarding the website name… I do not consider myself to be unordinary. The name is not a reference to my persona. When people hear it there are usually comments made to the effect that they believe the opposite, and it takes too long to explain it well. People, in my opinion, are impossible to categorize as ordinary. If there is no ordinary, there can be no unordinary. Either that, or everyone is unordinary, which does not fit the definition of the term. people tend to relate best to others with similar interests. They may congregate in groups and call those with dissimilar interests “weird” or “different,” but it is likely that a different group is simultaneously referring to them as “weird.” Even within these cliques people have things about themselves they would rather not share with the group for fear it would be too different from the group norm to be accepted. There is a heavily tattooed punk kid somewhere ashamed of their undying love of Elton John music, for instance. People all have fetishes, tendencies, preferences or emotions that they think no one else would understand, but that are common to most people in different combinations. People are similar, but our genetics and environments and many other factors contribute to make us all feel that at least some of the time we don’t fit into the appropriate social mold. We are not mass produced homogeneous products or BORG.
The name Unordinary refers to handmade items that do not appear on store shelves by the identical thousands. Toothpicks, plastic sporks, hair gel, instant mashed potatoes, and light bulbs are ordinary. Paintings and handmade things are a series of (yeah, yeah, no ideas are absolutely “new” anymore, but…) unique items that are not duplicated exactly. This makes them unordinary when compared to something one might see at a retail store.