TOOLBelt

This month, we met up and had the best day with the incredible Martha Summers - Butch artist, architect and leatherworker, to discuss and explore her iconic piece - TOOLBelt.

Interview and Words: Carter Howe @carterkhowe

When I finally connect with Summers over Zoom, I’m greeted by a set of high cheekbones and a close-shaven crew cut with a camouflage t-shirt. This is Martha Summers, an architect, artist, and most recently the creator of TOOLBelt. Martha describes the piece on her website as “a very special leather toolbelt x harness entirely handmade by [herself].” This absurdist piece of sculpture began almost as a joke but became increasingly meaningful during the process of crafting it. Summers says it is at once an autobiographical object, a playful commentary on butch lesbian culture, and a kind of love letter to those at the centre of lesbian/DIY Venn diagram.”

During the pandemic, Martha found herself with much more time to execute the ideas she had in her head. She conceptualized TOOLBelt as a joke (which was initially shared as a Tweet many years ago). As someone who uses a strap-on to have sex, Martha explained that the idea of TOOLBelt was partly based on the appeal of swapping out different toys at their leisure. She began designing the work initially with this pragmatic use in mind. “Then,” she explains, “when I started working on it, it evolved more into like a kind of sculptural piece, which was speaking more about the significance of DIY and construction to people like me. It was a bit autobiographical. I was making an absurd sculpture because realistically — the original idea I had wouldn’t be practical cause you’d be fucking someone and then you’d have like a bunch of dicks dangling around at your sides. It wouldn’t actually be like a solution.” The art itself took on a whole new perspective of humour in the face of the butch aesthetic. “Even if you think of it as a serious object, it’s incredibly butch because it’s pragmatic to the point of like absurdity [laughs]. I think it’s almost like fetishizing usefulness.”

For Martha, leather isn’t the be-all-end-all for her creative journey. Right now it is simply the medium that is delivering the messages she feels most compelled to use. She does not feel like a leatherworker whose sole mission is to create and sell; as a hands-on butch with a bunch of spare leather lying around with 10 years of on-and-off leather sculpting experience, it felt natural to progress in a direction where she felt the creativity come to a point. She loves to combine leather with other things as well, like TOOLBelt and allowed her to return to the art of sculpture with the materials she had around the house. The type of leather Martha uses is important to her, which is called “veg tan” leather. Veg tan, or vegetable-tanned leather, is leather at its most basic and purest form. Free of dye or stain, its natural tan changes with age, exposure to the sun, or physical wear, which affect its shade. The affectation perhaps reflects a fondness for queer meanings that change and sediment over time, as she mentioned earlier.

The reception of TOOLBelt was fiery, immediate, and sexual, all of which threw its unsuspecting creator for a loop. When Martha initially crafted the idea with a plan for execution, she imagined she would post it on her Instagram, 200 of her friends would see, and recognize that Martha made something, and then the next day everyone would continue living their life. In one week, the post accumulated over 5,400 likes, 260 comments, and Martha gained about 1,500 followers. To her, it was a very strange experience, as she hadn’t thought beyond the context of a few friends having a laugh. On top of the spark of engagement on Martha’s Instagram was the myriad of ways that people interpreted the piece. Martha began to realize what the significance of the piece was to herself through the reactions of the audience. However, the most surprising one for Martha was an audience interpreting the artwork as a product for sale. The reaction made her realize how autobiographical the piece was to her, and much more than a piece of art that elicits a giggle. “The work is not a commercial product,” Martha says, “and so any further replicas would be made as editions of an artwork- but I think it’s important to really take my time over what I want to do with my own work, and not have it be led by the temptation of monetisation”. She also currently works full-time as an architect alongside her artistic practice, and the handcrafted, handsewn TOOLbelt is not an item that can be quickly, or cheaply reproduced, whilst leaving time for new works to come about too.

The nuanced and ever-developing relationship between Martha and her piece of work perhaps stems from Martha’s queer evolution over the last few years. “I came out in my mid-twenties,” she says. “So I've only really been butch for seven years; which, now that I think about it, really isn’t that small of an amount of time... I was a baby butch. I was one thing and now I feel I'm slightly something else. These days I would absolutely say my butchness exists on its own, but it's a butchness that I feel most acutely in touch with in a femme context... it feels most electric and alive when it's directly in opposition to the extreme opposite.”

Today, she’s in love with the idea of a refined lesbian caricature. When I ask her who brings her gender euphoria, Martha stated “No one super springs to mind .... though I think it says a lot that one of my style icons is Lois from Dykes to Watch Out For [by Alison Bechdel]. I know they’re not a real person, but... [laughs].” She leans into cartoonish butchness with her newfound comfort in—and revival of—who she was as a kid. When speaking on the relationship between her butch sensibility and pragmatic sensibility, she says, "I was a child that was going behind a garden shed and finding three bricks and being like, “could I build a house with these?”, sneaking into the shed and stealing tools that I wasn't allowed to use. “Whatever it is about making things and making things in this particularly rugged hands-on way has been attracting me since I was a teeny tiny child. Obviously, I was a butch child and [butchness and being hands-on] are very linked for me. I guess it goes back to what we talked about earlier, these ideas about things that are utilitarian and pragmatic and all of those things. But I think what I think the lesbian twist on that, is that it's a sort of camp utilitarianism.”

These themes of construction and butch identity are explored in the editorial. Captured by Sophie Williams, Martha dons various utilitarian garments from dirty orange coveralls to washed-out painters chaps. Getting your hands dirty and “DIY” as concepts extend far beyond its origins of childlike wonder and curiosity — as we see with Martha, it can grow to be an identity with clothing. She portrays this hands-on culture with lesbian camp-ness and an exaggeration of uniform in the process.

And although reflecting on her younger self has resonated and risen from building and showcasing the ToolBelt, so has a consideration for future Martha Summers. “Recently, there was an exhibition in London, ‘WE/ US,’ at Space Station 65, and it was these portraits by Roman Manfredi of working-class butches and studs across the UK. And that I found incredibly inspiring in the sense that there were so many older butches in that exhibition — seeing a future for yourself. The way these older butches were dressing and holding themselves. I think that was very affirming and it really made me quite emotional to have there be this wider community of people to aspire to or just even to see that I'll still be hot in 40 years.”

For many queer people, womanhood is a complicated concept. Martha realigned herself with her butchness after a decade-long stint of relatively normative femininity as a means of survival. I mentioned how two people might see me, a transmasculine person who has medically transitioned, and Martha, a butch lesbian, and not see a huge superficial difference in the expression of our divergence from traditional femininity. But arriving at that place is two completely different paths. I asked Martha what her relationship with womanhood is at this point, given her lack of association with masculinity. She said, “I have been thinking about my gender identity my whole life, because I was getting mistaken for a boy when I was a child, and I was bullied for looking like a boy as a teenager. Then, I did everything I possibly could for 10 years to be a heterosexual feminine woman. I couldn't do that anymore, and I came out, and within a year, I pretty much looked like this. I’ve been in and out of thinking about things since then. I think a really useful tipping point for me was realizing that I was autistic. And that actually, it's more that other people have a relationship to my gender, than I do. Cause really it's more that I've spent a lot of my time thinking about other people's reaction to just me vibing. I've spent so much of my life, as a result, paranoid and questioning things. And these days, really to cut a long story short, I'm just doing what feels good.” At this point, her current sense of self is so much more “expansive and delicious” than whatever she was trying to portray before coming out. She says, “Yeah. I mean, womanhood. Yeah, it’s whatever. It’s around.”

It is not lost on Martha that the relationship between an artist, their work, and the audience is one of the great convolutions surrounding art. Who owes who when an artist creates a piece and shares it with the public, who then demands a copy of it to support the artist and also satisfy their own needs? By proxy of sharing it with the world, does the artist owe their audience a piece of it? What if the artist has not fully realized what their relationship is with the piece by the time it is revealed to the public? These are some questions Martha Summers wrestles with, a year on from sharing the work. It seems as though the exploration of self and others, and the reaction of self as expressed by others, make the footsteps on the quest for becoming more comfortable in one’s own identity. Without putting herself or her work out into the universe, Martha never would have encountered an opportunity to adopt a more studied approach to the reception of her own craft. Though there is no perfect formula to exact a perfect relationship between an artist and their supporters, Martha is getting closer to the study of herself and the reactions of others. Martha’s TOOLbelt is a landmark of such exploration with its innate relation to butchness both personally and within the community. As queer people allow themselves the freedom and joy to see and identify with queer art, they get closer to the joy that comes with being true to one’s identity, which Martha, in her element, exuded on set.