Words Edward M. Gómez Photographs Carlton Davis
Originally published in No 9
Real-estate agents in the United States often get it wrong, announcing that they are selling “homes” when, in fact, what they are hawking are houses, apartments, or other dwellings, some new or some old and in need of repair, but all merely containers for prospective inhabitants — individuals or families who will move in and, with creativity and passion, transform them into places of comfort, shelter, soulfulness, and, sometimes, remarkable beauty. It is people who make homes out of the empty shells of modest shacks or ostentatious mansions.
It has been about a year since the artist Jenny Hampe acquired an old house in Kinderhook, a tiny village in the mid-Hudson Valley, just north of the riverside town of Hudson. There, this skilled creator and conservator of textiles who is a master of embroidery and the needlework arts has turned a plain, small box of a building, whose construction dates back to the 1770s, into a showcase for her collections of folk art, outsider art, fabric art, and antiques. As a maker and collector of collage works, too, she has made her cozy house into a refuge in which she can find inspiration and experiment with ways of expressing a deeply personal aesthetic and humanistic vision, and a related way of living, which she has developed over many decades. Motivated by a core set of environmentally responsible principles and, materially, employing a unique mix of old and new, American and Scandinavian furnishings that she has gathered over many years, in tiny Kinderhook Hampe has created a long-imagined, long-coveted, soul-nurturing dream home.
“For a long time, my main obsession has been the idea and the goal of achieving self-sufficiency,” she says. “Of course, the whole point of a modern house is to provide certain comforts and efficiencies, but in my own home, I strive to make as much as I can myself and to fill it with objects and furnishings that reflect my values and concerns.”
Hampe, who was born in Ohio in 1965 and grew up in Westport, Connecticut, notes, “I’ve always been a home-maker. I appreciate and respect the art of home-making.” Her father, she recalls, was a corporate executive, and her mother a “bohemian artist,” a woman who, after Jenny’s parents divorced, struggled to provide for herself and her daughter but was determined and resourceful. Hampe remembers, “Somehow, she managed to survive by selling her art, even if sometimes she had to produce dull ‘dentist’s office art’ — pictures of fruit or flowers — just to earn some income. She was a real artist and she made sacrifices.” Hampe’s mother liked antiques and folk art, and often took Jenny on excursions into the New England countryside to search for flea-market treasures.
By contrast, Hampe’s father and stepmother — Jenny sometimes refers to her father’s late second wife, with whom she did not grow up, as her “stepmonster” — were both involved in real estate and enjoyed a life of relative affluence. Hampe recalls, “Although my stepmother was not a very sweet person, like my mother, she was a talented home-maker. They both knew how to sew and cook well, and how to create a distinctive sense of place. I learned a lot from them.”
In the 1980s, Hampe studied filmmaking and photography at New York University in Manhattan, working as a cashier at Dean & Deluca in SoHo, as a salesperson at an antique-cameras shop, and at other jobs that allowed her to pay her rent — and to save up to buy what she now describes as “a crazy obsession”: a navy-blue Chanel suit. Having already developed good sewing skills as a teenager — later she would also learn how to weave and knit — she was beginning to feel torn between the kind of desire that made her yearn to own a specimen of high-chic fashion and what she was recognizing as more urgent, non-materialistic values.
She left NYU and, on a tip from fellow students, traveled to Kentucky to study with the American sculptor Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), who had become known for his rejection of consumer culture, his warnings about the threats of industrialization, and his suggestion that a life in communion with the land could yield spiritual rewards. Hampe notes, “I was ready for and I was seeking spiritual wisdom, ideally through mystical experiences.” After a couple years under Hubbard’s tutelage and having steeped herself in the writings of Thomas Merton, the Daoists, and St. Teresa of Ávila, the 16th-century, Spanish mystic, Hampe retreated with a boyfriend to a small island off the coast of Maine. She says, “I was looking for an indescribable sensation — that of no separation whatsoever between myself and everything around me. In that remote place, where life was hard, I began to find it.”
A few years and a few boyfriends later, with the first of two Norwegian husbands, Hampe continued along that journey, savoring life on a farm in rural Norway “where there was no road, no electricity, and no running water.” Later, with her second Norwegian husband and their children, a menagerie that included cats, dogs, goats, horses, chickens, and other animals, and a garden that produced a bounty of medicinal and culinary herbs, Hampe found an even more ideal home-making retreat.
There, at the base of a fjord and cut off by many miles from the nearest town, Hampe home-schooled her youngest son, spun thread, wove fabric, washed clothes by hand, milked cows by candlelight, churned butter, made cheese and sauerkraut from scratch, canned and pickled vegetables from food she had grown herself, cooked on a wooden stove, and carried water in pails hung from a rod across her back. She also made her own soap and candles.
A documentary about Hampe’s rustic life was produced and broadcast by a Norwegian television channel in 2008; in it, she stated, “Most of us have at one time or another in our lives bought into the big lie that has been taught to us by advertising and the media — that buying things and consuming [makes for] a more meaningful life than creating things with our own hands.”
She added, “In this age of global warming, we all have a responsibility to the Earth and to future generations to do what we can. [...] We cannot continue as we are doing. About five years ago, people looked at me as though I were crazy when I said that. But it’s now a fact that we cannot continue living the way we do. Our human obsession with speed, comfort, and ease is killing the planet, and we’re committing suicide. That’s why I live the way that I do. [...] It’s not just about my own personal satisfaction, but I’m trying to live in a way that does as little damage as possible. It’s also very satisfying to create things with your own hands. It’s incredibly fulfilling to live such a life.”
For Hampe, whose work includes serving as the head gardener on a large estate in Connecticut, to be guided by ecologically conscientious principles in creating a home is a first, personal step that anyone can take to help heal and protect humanity’s collective home — the Earth. That attitude spills over into and informs her work as a textiles and needlework artist.
As someone who sews, the work for which she recently has become best known is her stylish, so-called visible mending of all sorts of garments, from wool socks to old jeans and jackets. In Brooklyn and Kinderhook, she has led sold-out fabric-darning workshops at which she has taught techniques for rescuing shirts, sweaters, and other pieces of clothing instead of throwing them away. She learned the fabric-mending methods she employs today by studying repaired antique textiles, including those featuring Japanese sashiko running-stitch darning and boro patching.
As its name suggests, a needleworker who does visible mending uses threads or hand-made patches of different hues, which contrast with rather than exactly match a damaged garment’s original color. Stitching in a way that emulates actual weaving or stitching around an area larger than a tear or hole in a particular piece of clothing are just two of Hampe’s visible-mending techniques. As busy as she is with repair jobs for an array of clients, many of whom have seen her handiwork on Instagram, where she posts photos as sauerkrautmissionary22, lately Hampe has had one particularly ambitious mending task in mind.
She explains, “Years ago, I got rid of the few designer clothes that I owned but I kept a second Chanel suit that I had bought; it’s tweed and today it has holes. I can’t wait to repair it using contrasting-color thread, which is exactly the opposite of what is normally done with such high-end clothing. It’s radical!”
In some ways, Hampe regards what she has done to transform the simple house she acquired in Kinderhook into a vibrant, art-filled residence as something of a mending mission in its own right, albeit on a larger scale. “I’m obsessed with recycling,” she says. “Many of the kitchen utensils, pieces of furniture, picture frames, and books that are now in this house were found and given a new life here — everything is in use and functional; nothing is merely a ‘decoration.’ I’m having fun making and repairing things, and bringing them into this house.”
She pauses, puts down her ever-present needlework — right now she is using sturdy-cotton sashiko thread to repair a client’s white shirt — and adds, “I’m a home-maker. What can I say? Nothing gives me more satisfaction than being able to create my own home.”
Edward M. Gómez is the senior editor of Raw Vision, the international, outsider art magazine; he writes for Hyperallergic, the New York Times, and other publications in the U.S. and overseas.
Carlton Davis is a regular contributor to UD, we love his work. He is repped by clmus.com