HÄN Archive

Martha Summers on TOOLbelt, butch identity and queer design

Martha Summers is an architect, artist, and leatherworker based in London. She is also a creator of one of the unmissable queer moments of 2022. If you happened to spend some time on queer instagram back then, you have probably seen her most famous artwork titled ‘TOOLbelt’.

Martha admits that she made ‘TOOLbelt’ almost as a joke, “her contribution to the pantheon of ironic lesbian art”. Yet it has struck the cord across many communities: it made people laugh, made people horny and most importantly, made people feel seen.

An architect by day, Martha has a personal artistic, architectural and design practice which explores domesticity, self-fashioning and butch identity. She also designs queer spaces: exhibition ‘Out and About! Archiving LGBTQ+ history at Bishopsgate Institute’ which took place at the Barbican’s Curve in 2022, London LGBTQ+ Community Centre and the Feminist Library.

To celebrate Martha’s work at HÄN, we talked about the process behind ‘TOOLbelt’, butch material palette, DIY as a queer practice – and what is the meaning of the queer design today.

Introduction and interview by Anastasiia Fedorova

Martha Summers, 'TOOLbelt', 2022

Could you tell me a little bit about your work as an architect and artist?

I'm an architect, I trained as an architect and I have a day job as an architect at a firm, currently working on a new art gallery. I do my own architectural projects outside of that” I worked on the LGBTQ+ Community Centre on the Southbank and the Feminist Library's new space a few years ago. Last year I designed the ‘Out and About!’ exhibition with Bishopsgate Institute at the Barbican Centre. Alongside that I have an artistic practice that is intermingled with construction and design.

Your ‘TOOLbelt’ has become a bit of an iconic piece for the community. How did it happen and what’s the story behind it?

I had the idea a really long time ago, like 2018 when I was lying in bed in my tiny flat. I think I genuinely had the idea as like, oh that would actually be practically useful.

For a long time I had a long list of ideas, but I was just so mentally unwell after I came out in my mid-20s, and it took a really long time for me to have any kind of stability to work on anything other than just going to my day job and getting by. In the pandemic, whilst it was a horrific time, it also was a period when I didn't have much going on and I was able to heal a bit. And then I looked at this list of 30 things I'd written down over the last five years and was like, What should I do? Let's pick something.I almost picked it at random, but it did feel a bit ridiculous that this didn’t exist. So I thought, Let’s just get that done, you know, for the culture. So we all have this and we can move on.

I started making the piece in 2021. I really was thinking that I’m just making this for me. It was a bit autobiographical and I just thought I'd stick it on my Instagram and 200 of my friends would be like, “Oh my God, haha, you made it”. I didn't really make it as a prototype, I made it like an absurd sculpture in a way.

Martha Summers, 'TOOLbelt', 2022

And then it unexpectedly became very popular. Has it traveled much further than you expected?

It’s interesting that it went viral, but only in a queer way. It just stayed within this community. I didn't get a single negative comment from anyone. The main unanticipated thing was dealing with people wanting one, which had never even crossed my mind. I thought people would like it, but I didn't realise how meaningful some people would find it. I had never conceptualised it as like a product because I thought ultimately, if you want a harness, you should buy a harness. And if you want a tool belt, you should buy a tool belt. And both of those things will function better individually. That was a bit of a surprise to have suddenly hundreds of people wanting to buy something that wasn't for sale.

Why do you think it resonated with people so much?

There's a certain community of people who I have a lot in common with: queer people, butches, transmasc people who have a relationship to like construction and DIY… Basically everyone who exists at the cross over of strap ons and making stuff. But then also on the flip side of that, you have people who find that hot and sexy. So I think it resonated with people in different ways.

The big thing for me is the idea about DIY and mending that goes beyond the surface level of being sexy. Queerness is a lot like DIY, and being gender non-conforming I find that it's about making and mending and crafting a life for yourself out of things that were not designed for you, to DIY your whole identity in a way.

Another thing which I think resonated was the idea about tools. In a way, a dildo, or as I would prefer to call it, a dick, is just like another tool. For some people, a strap on is completely utilitarian, just something you need to get the job done. For other people, it's not like that. And I don't think there's any sort of hierarchy of whether it should or shouldn’t be a kinky thing. But strap ons are unbelievably every day to me. I just don't think twice about it. And it was interesting to encounter different perceptions of the object with different audiences.

Martha Summers - 'Spread thick', detail image

I am very interested in how you explore DIY, mending and altering broken things and the very idea of the practical and useful in the queer context – could you talk a little bit about that?

Since I was a tiny child, I was trying to steal stuff from the garden shed that I wasn't allowed to use. I love tools, I love making stuff. I think some of it comes from a bit of a sad place of wanting to escape and build a world for yourself where you can feel happy and belong.

The mending of pots and mudlark fragments is something I just started doing. Taking things from the foreshore that are the most unwanted things, fragments of glass that are intact enough that I could complete this in a way, but that is very visible and not trying to yield it into a complete original state. Making something new from something unwanted feels like an extremely queer process.

It feels like a very butch practice to me. It's probably not true for everyone, but the way I experience a butch femme dynamic is about the delicious tensions and mysteries that exist in this elective binary. I do this stuff and I know about these things which are very utilitarian, rough and ready. It’s like having like a shit ton of pockets.

Martha Summers - 'Mended pots', Blue Victorian medicine bottle (Greenwich) - timber & glue

Martha Summers - 'Strap Chair', Mended Chair, No Glue (2022)

Martha Summers - 'Strap stool', Mended chair, detail image

Last year you designed the ‘Out and About!’ exhibition at the Curve at the Barbican. The choice of fabrics, patterns and textures was super interesting, like plaid fabric and wood. It’s very unusual for gallery shows which are usually done in one block colour. What was your process for designing it?

Thank you! When I got offered to design this exhibition, I started thinking of big queer shows I’ve seen. Often what you get, especially in big institutions, they're either pink or they're like kind of rainbow vibes, or they're just sanitised and everything's white.

I have decided to do something different, a butch material palette. There were plaid fabrics, bits of leather, some chains… A lot of it I did myself by hand, I spray painted the furniture I installed, added all the chains, I made the little leather tabs on the magazines myself. And same as with my work on LGBTQI+ community centre, it was all queer fabricators making everything.

Martha Summers - 'Out and About!', 2022

Did you also think of a particular way the show was organised? With lots of smaller spaces within the big space, the reading area and other elements?

The big idea with that show was doing away with a linear organisation to an exhibition… It's a big jumble, which is how they do it at Bishopsgate when they have the open days, everything's just out on the tables. I was thinking of how we can bring that feeling to this quite stark institutional space of the curve.

It's a really linear space, but it's also a bent space, so you can make a queer reading of it because it’s quite a weird odd space. It's tall and bendy and strange. Placing the display cases down the centre of the space kind of forced people to take their own route and make connections between pieces. It felt like a very queer process.

The show not only looked good but felt good too. It felt good to be in the space.

Putting that big table at the centre really worked because I think often people put reading areas at the end. It was like placing the community at the very centre of everything, surrounded by the work. It was so nice hearing the stories about people getting each other's numbers and eyeing each other up in that space. That's all I could have wanted, kind of like a cruising ground.

Martha Summers - 'Out and About!', 2022

You have designed a few queer spaces before and I was just wondering, what is the meaning of queer design or queer architecture for you? Most of the places we occupy obviously are not designed by queer people. So what is it that makes the difference?

It's something that you can't really strictly define, and it shifts with time and context.

It also depends on the type of space. When I worked on the community centre that was largely about finding a way to create a space that people would feel like they could completely take ownership of, a home for the community. It is helpful to have an architect or designer at the start to put some building blocks in place for them, to enable the flexibility and for people to make the space their own.

I guess there's also a more conceptual or artistic way of thinking about it, which for me is all about mending and DIY. Because you're usually working with spaces that already exist. The methodology I've been developing is a kind of queer appraisal of the space where you look at it and ask, where are the cracks and inconsistencies in this space? Where is it where real life is already starting to leak through? What are the strange materials that maybe already exist here or odd junctions or strange little moments in the space?

That's certainly like what I did with the curve. At first I was like, how the hell are you supposed to do like a queer show in this, like, super institutional space? But then when I started to look at it through like a queer lens, I realised that actually it's a really fucking weird space. It's like leftover space. It's bending, and the sound does really weird things in there.

I guess this is where this connects with my expanded practice. It doesn't feel that different to me to taking a fragment of a bottle from the foreshore and looking at what are the potentials within this thing and how do I start to read it through a queer reparative lens.

Also I try to approach any project in a way that isn't final and sort of top down. It’s not saying “here is my incredible queer artistic vision for this space and don't even think about repainting the walls”. It’s like you're just stitching one piece into the quilt of a space and leaving lots of room for there to be more patches.

Credits:

Martha Summers on TOOLbelt, butch identity and queer design

Curator: Anastasiia Fedorova

Introduction and interview: Anastasiia Fedorova

All images courtesy of Martha Summers

An archive piece created by HÄN.

22/04/2023