[title]
Each week, we interview an interesting and stylish New Yorker about his or her life in the city. Meet Caitlin Rose Sweet, a 38-year-old queer maker in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
What does your title mean?
I use the connotations of handmade [objects] as a platform to explore our relationship to constructs of the body, gender, sexuality, race and class. I record and create radical queer visual culture.
What kind of art do you make?
We live in this really toxic environment, and I make bright, complex work that counterbalances how oppressive the world is. I’m interested in how bodies connect, particularly thinking about feminism and queer theory and body positivity.
Photograph: Teddy Wolff
What can people buy from your online shop?
I sell a lot of weed pipes. I have a line of feminist girl-stoner stuff, and ceramic tchotchkes with a lot of hands and fingernails and flower vases that are all these wonky feminine body representations.
Describe your personal style.
This amazing queer witch healer Dori Midnight said to treat your body like an altar and decorate it in a way that makes you feel pleasure in your body. I think that my fashion is about [that idea]: How do I represent how I feel in the world?
Photograph: Teddy Wolff