Add Category
Posted
Beci Orpin can be socially awkward.
When the Melbourne designer met one of her idols, author and art renegade Miranda July, last year, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind. And it wasn't good.
"She'd done the most hilarious show about how it's hard to be a woman in the entertainment industry. And I just said to her, 'I really love your husband's work'." (July is married to filmmaker Mike Mills.)
"That's all I said to her. I was like, 'What the f**k did I just do?'"
And just like that, Australia's high priestess of design and illustration pricks the bubble of what her many admirers must think it's like to be her.
Because, after publishing four DIY craft books and two kids' books, working on several high-profile creative collaborations and attracting an impressive list of celebrity fans (actor Susan Sarandon loved the paper collage of breasts that Orpin made for International Women's Day this year), Orpin has gained the reputation of someone who lives a charmed life, like a designer's version of La La Land.
Or, as Vice magazine once put it, "Everything she touches turns into a rainbow".
Orpin's disclosure about her public humiliation, on the eve of the debut of her fourth DIY craft book, is surprisingly apt.
Sunshine Spaces is ostensibly about "bringing the sunshine into your life and home", by making projects like a "nature mobile" using branches and leaves, and a macrame chair.
But it's the behind-the-scenes struggles and screw-ups — in making this book, in her marriage, and in parenting — that are bound to make readers feel as though they've just settled down on a sunny patch of grass after an arduous hike.
When family holidays go wrong
Because in a world full of drool-worthy Instagram feeds of Tahitian vacations and giggling glam squads, which can make a person feel, comparatively, like a troll humping through life with broken teeth, it can be a relief to hear someone admit that their last family holiday went utterly wrong.
"That holiday sucked," Orpin says, referring to a trip she took to Byron Bay earlier this year with her husband, Raph Rashid, and their two sons, Ari, nine, and Tyke, 13.
Orpin posted a photo from the holiday on Instagram of Ari, gazing up at Tyke, noting that it was a "rare holiday moment ... where the kids are being nice to each other and I wasn't yelling at them".
"Raph got a bit sick, and I'm like the most unsympathetic person in the world when it comes to sick people. I was just like a bitch," Orpin says.
"Then we stayed at this camp, we thought it was a really good idea, because we're pretty bad at camping, but it was like, you can't stay in a tent during the day, can't have afternoon naps, because it's so goddamn hot. Oh man."
Still, it's hard not to assume that Orpin, 43, must have a better time than the rest of us at handling other gruelling parenting tasks.
She recently contributed cheery anatomical illustrations of a boy and a girl to the groovy parenting magazine Lunch Lady, for a feature on how to talk to your kids about sex.
Her sons are not put off by such images, she admits. But they do throw up other challenges.
"My youngest son, Ari's favourite word is 'penis', and has been for a very long time," Orpin says.
"He uses it in the most inappropriate situations, because it's not a swear word, and he knows it makes people uncomfortable."
A favourite pastime of his, she says, is to type the word into her phone, which is connected to a blue tooth speaker, while she has friends over for dinner, so that the word blares through.
"And he'll do it several times, 'Penis, penis, penis, penis, penis...' Can you just stop? You're nine years old. Yes, it's funny, but it's boring."
Sunshine Spaces screw-ups
Orpin, who has designed everything from technicolour textiles (for fashion label Gorman), to toilet paper (for the brand Who Gives A Crap), has weathered her fair share of professional embarrassments, too.
Her plan to include a project to make a concrete sundial in Sunshine Spaces was "a disaster", she says.
She only realised two days before the shoot that it would be far too complicated for anyone to make, and had to scramble to devise and shoot a replacement project (dried flowers).
The macrame chair, too, was a debacle. Orpin struggled to put it together on the day of the shoot.
And after each step of the project was photographed, she realised that none of the photographs matched the individual steps that had been written up for the book.
"It was a total disaster. I had to pay for another photo shoot to do it again," Orpin says.
This will likely be a wake-up call for her fans, many of whom flock to her for her whimsical tutorials — including a paper confetti wall, "giant wall sprinkles", and pet rocks — and view her life as though it's been one smooth, sunny ride, from her start as a fledgling fashion designer (of children's label, Tiny Mammoth) to freelance design superstar.
As one fan wrote on the popular blog The Design Files, when it featured Orpin's arts and craft-filled Victorian house in Melbourne's West Brunswick, "so good it hurts, sigh."
"Whenever I speak to people, they're always like, 'I love you because you're so real', or whatever," Orpin says.
Still, she feels the need to correct the outside perception of her life as charmed.
"My life is just like your life. It's, like, cooking every night for my children."
'My family is incredibly political'
Although, in fairness, not all of us spent some of our formative years in a commune in Melbourne, as Orpin did. Or were raised by a mother who was a well-known social justice campaigner.
"She used to work in a women's refuge, and when there was a security break" — when an abuser would find the refuge, for example — "all the women would come to our house," says Orpin of her mother, Marg D'arcy, who ran as the Labor member for the Victorian seat of Kooyong in last year's federal election.
Indeed, evidence of Orpin's upbringing is reflected in her Instagram feed, which lately has featured, among her trademark images of ice-cream signs and giddy workshop participants, more coverage of news events, like a photograph of a protest, in the wake of the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, and a poster with the phrase, "We Should All Be Feminists".
Her fans — she has 60,000 Instagram followers — have responded positively to her more serious posts, she says.
But Orpin is still working out how much of her political side to show the world.
"I guess politics is a weird one for me," she says. "My family is incredibly political, my whole life, growing up, we were going to demonstrations. We always had election parties, and if the Labor Party didn't come in, it was doom and gloom.
"It became a really emotional thing. It would base the mood of the house. Because of that, I rejected politics, very much so."
So Orpin, who for the last couple of years has taught weekly workshops at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, is still working her way through it.
And she notes that the current cultural climate — in which celebrities like Lena Dunham and actress Brie Larson pursue overtly political agendas, and are praised for it — is conducive towards standing up for what you believe in.
"I think there's definitely a trend for people to be more aware and conscientious," she says. "Perhaps I wouldn't be posting [political] things if that wasn't happening, which makes me sick to even say that."
But she's a work in progress, just like the rest of us.
Topics: books-literature, craft, popular-culture, parenting, people, internet-culture, social-media, melbourne-3000