In a world of marshmallow hills, stalactites, and cotton-candy skies live “squishies”—enormous fleshy creatures, fumbling around their sleepy worlds, guts and body parts akimbo, each with their own backstories and palpable personalities.
Squishies— also less endearingly labeled “flesh suits”—are the invention of U.K.-based artist Daisy Collingridge, one of the artists operating under the wing of the Sarabande Foundation, a charity established by the late Alexander McQueen to nurture nascent creatives. At the intersection of sculpture and wearable art, squishies are handmade bodysuits crafted of fabric and bean bag–style pellets.
But Collingridge didn’t set out to make avant-garde art. She initially studied fashion design at the prestigious Central Saint Martins in London; however, she “just didn’t see a place where [she] fit in.” Her squishies are worn by people but aren’t the kind of ensembles you see sent down the catwalk at London Fashion Week (although they would undoubtedly make things more interesting).
“My family is quite science-y,” Collingridge tells Mission, explaining that her artistic path made her the “dark horse.” But in keeping with her family’s penchant for the sciences, it was her interest in the mechanics of the human body that led to the squishies’ inception.
“It’s just appreciating the machine of the human body, the fact that it can do all this stuff,” she explains. Collingridge has long been fascinated by the drawings of 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, considered the founder of modern human anatomy. So when her Saint Martins tutor suggested she put herself forward for New Zealand’s World of Wearable Arts competition, she set about creating a quilted version of Vesalius’s linear illustrations. The first squishy was born.
“The idea was technique-led, which is often the case with me. The actual making process is very impulsive. I don’t really draw that much; I just go for it and see where it takes me.”
Collingridge’s process is largely instinctual. “The idea was technique-led, which is often the case with me,” she says. “The actual making process is very impulsive. I don’t really draw that much; I just go for it and see where it takes me. You kind of just build it up; it’s a bit like sculpting in that sense.” Each squishy is made using a relief—a sculptural method in which pieces are bonded to a background of the same material—and hand-dyed. Each malleable limb and fat deposit is filled with a combination of weighted and bean-bag pellets, something Collingridge had to experiment with to make sure the extremities hung just right. The only machine-led part is the sewing in of the undergarments, which allow the squishies to be worn. On average, each one takes about four months to make.
The squishies’ “personas” come later. “I always make the head first, and the head has this character, and I then go on to make the rest of it,” she says. Before she christens the squishies with their names, she tries on each one, deciphering their personalities through how the distribution of the pellets dictates she walk in them. “Usually when you put them on, you move slightly differently. When I then start to work with other people, it’s interesting to see how they move in them and if that’s different from how I do,” she elaborates. Collingridge created a denim squishy aptly named “Jenny Jeggings,” a cheeky-looking high-ponytailed character called “Susan,” and a lumbering masculine creature dubbed “Burt.”
Collingridge is, understandably, particular about who wears her beloved creations. When she first began showcasing them she hired dancers, but she felt they overperformed, missing the mark on the mundane everydayness that is key to the squishies’ essence. Now she, her best friend, and her parents don the suits most often, which works well for Collingridge, who is, by nature, introverted. “I can be quite a shy person. So obviously working with people like your mum and dad, if you’re having a fluster they’ll just get on with it.”
Collingridge is not only selective about who steps into her squishies but also about who she allows to use her distinct creations. She often gets requests to feature them in music videos, but the answer is always a hard no. “You just have to be really careful about context with them,” she explains. She recently participated in her first-ever collaboration, a movie, with friend and fellow Sarabande artist Isabel Garrett. The film, Bod, transports us into the squishies’ fantasyland, constructed of fabric, as they go about their daily routine. “I trust Issy,” Collingridge explains. “There’s just something about the worlds that she creates that feel really similar to mine. There’s a beauty to them, but there’s also this sort of weird underlying melancholy.”
Both the squishies themselves and their natural habitats are pastel colored, predominantly pink, which has become Collingridge’s signature color. “Pink is that kind of comforting, familiar color,” she muses. “Some people see them as skinned people, like you’ve just ripped the flesh off, so if I’d made them blood red, that would be a very different thing. Whereas the pastels are making something that is quite hard to look at [become] nice to look at.”
“Some people see them as skinned people, like you’ve just ripped the flesh off, so if I’d made them blood red, that would be a very different thing. Whereas the pastels are making something that is quite hard to look at [become] nice to look at.”
But despite their inoffensive hues, some viewers have an automatic aversion to Collingridge’s creations, which are, to be fair, enormous and most notable for their loose flesh, but it wasn’t Collingridge’s intention to make the squishies off-putting. “When I first showed them in London I was there for the exhibition,” she recalls, “but people obviously don’t know who you are, so I could walk around and listen to people’s responses. And I learned that there is such a breadth of reaction. There are people like me who think they’re beautiful and love them. There are people like you that think they’re really cute, and there are people that absolutely hate them and find them offensive and grotesque.” Although she was initially taken aback, she’s since come to terms with the inevitability of viewers’ varying reactions. “I realized that they’re absolutely entitled to feel like that because everyone has such a personal relationship with their own body,” she says. “Who am I to dictate how you should feel when you see them?”
But are the squishies a comment on body image? As visceral representations of anatomy which are, true to their name, squishy, many perceive Collingridge’s work as such. She admits this wasn’t her intention, but it’s come as a happy accident. “[The squishies] can’t help but be body positive because they’re about celebrating the body and the fact that the body works and what it’s made of. I would be lying if I said that [body positivity] was a seed of my idea. I didn’t think of that when I was making them at the very start, but it certainly has fed into it as I’ve gone along.”
At their center, Collingridge’s squishies are a celebration of the human form— its mechanics, its resilience, and yes, the fleshy bits we tend to hide. Collingridge doesn’t mind if you find them offensive, but she can’t quite fathom why. “I make them because I think they’re beautiful,” she says. “I don’t purposely make them because I think they’re gross or grotesque. I don’t see that at all.”
Solo Exhibition on until 11th November at TJ Boulting, 59 Riding House St, Fitzrovia, London W1W 7EG, U.K. All images courtesy of the artist. This extract was taken from Mission’s latest issue, Identity.
