DIDDY WA DIDDY
Kelly Johnson · 2016 · Web design, Build, Hosting · Visit the site →
Thirty years of hand-sewn work, scattered across a blog, an Etsy shop and five social accounts, with nowhere that was actually hers.
Kelly Buntin Johnson salvages the discarded and gives it back its dignity. An embroidered butterfly potholder, a scrap of linoleum, a bead that outlived whoever first strung it — she hand-sews these with leather and European glass seed beads into pieces that sit somewhere between artifact and reliquary.
Her stated interest is the link between past and present, spirit and physicality, and she means it literally: the materials in her work were once part of somebody else’s life. It is close, patient, detailed work, and it does not photograph well from across a room.
Kelly was not invisible online. That was rather the problem. There was a Blogspot, an Etsy shop, a Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter — every one of them a fragment, none of them the whole. When a gallery or a writer asked for a link, there was no good answer.
The other issue was scale. Social platforms crop, compress and bury. Work built out of tiny stitched details was being shown at the one size that makes those details disappear.
We built a small, hand-written site whose entire job is to show the work properly: a gallery with room to breathe, an artist statement in Kelly’s own words rather than a paraphrase of them, and a contact page. That is close to all of it.
The bigger decision was what to leave out. Kelly already had a working Etsy shop, so we did not build a second one to compete with it — the site links out and lets Etsy do what Etsy is good at. We also chose not to put a content management system behind it. A CMS would have meant a login to remember, updates to install and a security surface to worry about, in exchange for a convenience Kelly did not ask for. She sends us new images; we put them up.
Quiet, and deliberately so. The work is dense and textural, so the page around it is not. Plain type, restrained colour, generous space, images given room to be looked at rather than scrolled past.
A site for an artist whose materials are salvaged from other people’s lives should not be shouting over the top of them.
Hand-written HTML and CSS. No database, no plugins, nothing that needs patching on a Tuesday because somebody found a hole in it. It loads immediately, including on a phone in a gallery car park.
We handle the hosting, the domain and the updates. Kelly handles the art.
There is now one link to give people. Galleries, press, curators and buyers all land in the same place, see the work at a size where the stitching is visible, and read Kelly’s own account of why she makes it.
The social accounts still exist and still do their job — but they point inward now, rather than each being a separate half-answer to “where can I see your work?”
If any of this sounds like your situation, have a look at how we work, or get in touch.
