Amber Sandy's 'The Mary' Birchkin Bag is made of birch bark, home-tanned deer hide, dyed porcupine quills, seed beads, cotton lining and artificial sinew.Supplied
From the moment it was introduced, the Hermès Birkin bag has been synonymous with peak luxury. The tony, top-handle accessory, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, was conceived of by Jean-Louis Dumas, former head of the French house, after a fabled encounter on a plane with British actor-singer Jane Birkin.
On the flight, Birkin, a jet-setting working mother, lamented the lack of a bag that could carry all of her essentials. She sketched out an ideal purse on a sick bag for Dumas and he came up with a design that addressed her needs – space for baby bottles included – while possessing the poshest of pedigrees.
Today, the Birkin is more of a status symbol than a stylish statement of doing-it-all progressiveness. And the lavish lifestyle it signifies has become thematic fodder for several contemporary sculpture artists looking to amplify, examine and even reinterpret what it represents.
During Mayfair Art Weekend in 2020, London-based sculptor, painter and installation artist Kalliopi Lemos debuted the monumental work, Bag of Aspirations, as part of her sculpture series Tools of Endearment. The outsized steel recreation of Hermès’s coveted carry all, weighing a whopping 380 kilograms, was exhibited on Bond Street – a destination itself synonymous with luxury goods.
The artist, in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, described the piece as a reflection on “how society deals with femininity, women’s rights and the condition of women within society.”
Where Lemos’s piece navigated the intersection of politics and design, Yonkers, N.Y.-based sculptor Barbara Segal takes a historical route with her interpretation of Hermès’s hallowed pieces.
Segal crafts Birkins (along with other luxury fashion bags from Chanel and Louis Vuitton) out of opulent marble. They’re the kinds of pieces Paris Hilton would buy if she was a Borghese. In a recent Instagram post about a new Birkin-inspired work, Palazzo Ducale, Segal wrote that the piece was carved “from the same Verona marble and Ischia limestone that adorn the Doge’s Palace in Venice, this piece features a brass quatrefoil detail. It’s a beautiful fusion of Venetian heritage and contemporary luxury symbolism.”
Amber Sandy, an Anishinaabe artist, synthesized the above themes with her clever wearable sculpture, The Mary. The piece, completed last year and presented at the Vancouver-based gallery Ceremonial / Art’s booth at Art Toronto in October, is a take on the Birkin and composed of birch bark, home-tanned deer hide, dyed porcupine quills, seed beads, cotton lining and artificial sinew. The sculpture is priced at $25,000 – not too far off from what a Birkin bag sells for.
Sandy, a member of the Neyaashiinigmiing, Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, told me that The Mary is a play on how Hermès and other luxury brands tout savoir faire – the vaunted techniques behind their bag production and the mythical quality of the materials used to make them.
“I’ve spent years developing strong relationships with [my] community to be able to learn these traditional skills,” Sandy said, adding that intergenerational skills including tanning, beading and working with wood have been imperilled by colonization, specifically the residential school system. “I feel an immense sense of pride in being able to carry on and hold and share this knowledge with people.”
The concept for her “Birchkin bag” materialized because of her love of “awful” reality television. Watching shows such as Real Housewives, she saw “these people with all of this money, doing things that are just projections of wealth.”
The Mary wearable sculpture is priced at $25,000.Supplied
She thought about what made her feel “extremely wealthy” and concluded it was her access to the ancestrally respected materials and skills she employs in her artistic practice.
To source the birch bark used in The Mary – so named after a beloved community member – Sandy used her long-forged connections, infusing her craft with the same connotations of dedication and attention as any so-called couture piece.
“It’s not as simple as going out and harvesting bark off of a tree by peeling it off. It’s about knowing where to go at exactly what time of year, how to ask for it before taking it and putting the time into your practice of developing relationships,” she said.
“When we want to learn something, we don’t just call someone up and say, I want to learn this thing for myself. We find somebody with the knowledge and we dedicate our time to helping them do their work so that we can learn through a reciprocal relationship. I think that’s a beautiful way that we do things as Anishinaabe people.”
The Birch tree, Sandy said, has particular significance because its bark is traditionally used in her community to make carry-all items: baskets, baby holders, even the original canoes they used to travel in. Her own art practice involves making pieces that are wearable, including earrings and, of course, bags.
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“When I’m creating, I want it to be something that’s usable. Birch bags are meant to be used, and they get better with age.” Here, there is another parallel with the Birkin bag and the patina it’s said to develop over time as its leather softens.
“The Mary exemplifies everything that I love about Indigenous contemporary art: continuance, resilience, humour and creativity,” said Jake Kimble, the gallery director and curator at Ceremonial / Art. “Amber not only brings the past to the present but also the future.”
But what is it about the Birkin, I ask Kimble, that makes it such a compelling subject for artists?
“I think for quite some time Hermès has held tight onto the cultural significance and status symbol of what a Birkin is and what it means,” he said.
“It has for so long enforced archaic class systems that I think, how could you not critique, challenge or make fun of these systems as an artist? What Amber does so successfully with The Mary is really put Hermès on its head – you can make the same style of bag but you can make it with community, care, knowledge and sustainability.”
And what of the original Birkin bag? The prototype was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in Paris this past July for US$10.1-million. A result, some would argue, befitting any bona fide work of art.