This is a vessel for beer, a "growler," that I covered in fur to create a visual pun. I'd initially come up with this as a simple joke, but as I worked on it I had some surprising thoughts come up.

While I was gluing fur to the bottle I thought about the fur-lined teacup created by Meret Oppenheim. When I'd first seen it, it struck me as almost erotically feminine – more so than any overtly sexual art I've seen. Oppenheim had covered a delicate cup, saucer, and teaspoon in gazelle fur. Fur is a wild thing, but it only accentuated the feminine nature of the objects due to their shape. I looked at the furry growler with its bluntly straight sides and utilitarian form, and could see only masculinity. It looked like a Wookie. The shape of the object being covered matters!

While wrapping the net around the growler to “capture” it, I thought of how we captured and domesticated wild yeasts to ferment grain into a beverage that would drive civilization to build taller pyramids and to perfect the waterproof clay jugs that would be later replaced by the glass growler I was holding. From the 16th to the 19th century in Europe, the most prolific and useful vessel was called a Bartmann jug. It was a German-made growler decorated with the face of a “wild man.”

A theme I've often seen in modern stories is that of a man feeling trapped by domestication: he is a wild thing that must constantly rein in his natural impulses - or he contains more than the narrow definition of manhood allows, and has been unconsciously taught to hide that he's not simply a vessel for useful masculinity. I'm thinking of the movie Fight Club, and the more current event of John Cena unfolding in all his glory.

By wrapping the growler in fur I've made it soft and taken away its prescribed purpose - made it less of something to be used, and allowed it to express itself in a new way.

For construction, I bought a fake fur pillow at value village. I'd found real fur, but felt like I might disrespect the animal by using it for a joke. I also found a teddy bear that had the perfect fur for the project, but felt guilty about cutting up a toy a kid might enjoy. I had a weird amount of feelings while trying to source materials for this project; I think the process clarified some of my personal values that have been hazy.

I used the pillow liner to create a pattern by wrapping it around the jug and tracing the cut points, then cut the fur to size and used hot glue to carefully “sew” it in place. Then I trimmed fur away wherever it would make the shape too obscured. I trimmed the handle and mouth most of all. I'm not sure if the shape of the growler is defined enough, I worry that I'll have to keep explaining what it is.

I'd bought what I thought was a snarl of jute twine, but to my delight turned out to be a length of jute netting. I used a scrap to tie a leash around the neck of the jug, then used the net to “capture” its body.