After a Fashion
Austin designer Jerri Kunz on plastic trees and the shoeless
By Stephen MacMillan Moser, Fri., July 21, 2006
A CHAT WITH JERRI She is an Austin legend – one of those citizens who make Austin as unique as it is. So we sat down with "Best of Austin" award-winning interior designer Jerri Kunz and fired a few questions at her, particularly about the faux topiary that graces the entrance to her studio.
Austin Chronicle: Jerri, as a designer skilled in so many areas, you are brilliant at turning raw materials into things of beauty. Why topiary? Or more importantly, why plastic topiary?
Jerri Kunz: It's funny, and besides, I kill living things. Also, it's very practical.
AC: What is it that set you on this charming road to artifice?
JK: As kids, we were always making things. One spring, my mother, a coastal kind of Martha, had us poking dowels into Styrofoam balls, then setting the stems into pots filled with plaster of paris. After it set, we pavéed the Styrofoam with plastic leaves and flowers. We were practiced in the technique. Just the Christmas prior, she'd had us pavéeing oranges with cloves. All this sounds so quotidian now, but then there were no magazines or Michaels to suggest these things. They just came out of her head. She'd never been anywhere or even graduated high school, but she was visionary. We lived in a tangle of vegetation, in a house little more than a shack. Everything, including the lot of us, was wild; every day unlike the day before. I think one of my many cousins was getting married, and we were decorating the hospitality room at the Falstaff beer brewery. Some of the topiary we made were 5 feet tall. We added white tulle poufs for the wedding effect. I was 9, or 10, and completely unimpressed by the idea of a white dress and veil ... but those topiary! I had never seen anything so fancy or so alien to the earthy life we lived. My father was a shrimper, and we tended to smell like fish. We had no air conditioning, and we never wore shoes, except to church and school, and here we were sprouting formal fake garden sculpture.
AC: But you wear fabulous shoes now …
JK: Absolutely. I have at least a hundred pairs.
AC: I pass by your studio on Fifth and West all the time – you have plastic grass and plastic plants, and you have an evolving series of messages on the building…
JK: I always wanted my own billboard. I have a lot to say. The challenge is condensing the message down to two or three sign boards, to five words or less.
AC: I notice you're missing one of your topiary.
JK: Yes, the insurance company refers to them as an attractive nuisance. It's true. They are under constant threat and siege and have endured every insult imaginable. Finally, I built fences around them to protect them, but last week someone jumped the fence and stole the cone-shaped one, again. Every morning I turn the corner at Fifth and West and steel up. I never know what kind of vandalism will greet me. All I want is to bring beauty and humor to life, to make people laugh, and for a moment, transport them away from their smelly lives. I've been a presence in downtown Austin for 30 years, a part of the pioneers who civilized the lunatic fringe. It's never gotten any easier, but I will never, never, never give up.
AC: Do you get discouraged?
JK: One of my favorite childhood games was one we called Good People/Bad People. Summer nights after supper, we sat on the concrete bunker separating our yard from the street and waved at strangers driving by. If they waved back, we put a mark in the Good People column of our makeshift score pad; and if they didn't, we marked them Bad. The results were always the same: There are more good people than bad people in the world. Way more. A half dozen strangers called or came by on the morning of the topiary theft to say that they had seen it, abandoned, a few blocks away. I retrieved it, albeit in pieces, and plan to glue it back together and reinstall it one more time. For the good people. For the smelly and the barefoot. For humor and beauty.
AC: Really, 100 pairs of shoes?
JK: Absolutely ... and several dozen bottles of perfume.
