By ION on Sep 17, 2010 in CULTURE
Your Piñata
If you’ve ever wanted to bash someone’s head in, Meaghan Kennedy, creator of the Vancouver-based company Your Piñata, can help. “I began making piñatas as sort of like a joke. A friend challenged me to make one for a local talent show in Vancouver—I kept bugging him to get a poodle piñata and he said just make one, and I did and it was super-duper fun,” says the 30-year-old self-taught craft maven.
After spending years working in retail, the tall willowy redhead has turned what seemed like a fun crafting hobby into a full-fledged homegrown business. “I took a really big leap leaving my job,” she says, tapping her acrylic nails on a cup of peppermint tea, “but I really think if you take a really bold move it’ll manifest things, and if you are actively pursuing then things will happen.” She’s already made piñatas for some big names: a Perez Hilton likeness for Black Eyed Peas singer Will.I.Am inspired by their now famous feud, and a hand-delivered piñata for the wrap party of The Vampire Diaries in Atlanta.
Looking through her window from outside. Meaghan’s apartment looks like a macabre torture chamber, but the figures hanging throughout her one-bedroom apartment are all actually drying works-in-progress. “I use balloons and paper; it’s just like when you were at school,” she says. These labour-intensive creations range from two feet tall to life-sized and take a few days to make including drying time. “Six feet tall is the largest I can do, ‘cause that’s as high as I can get out of my apartment. I live on the eighth floor, any bigger than that and it would have to be lowered off the balcony.”
“A lot of people think piñata and they think SpongeBob SquarePants, 10 dollars. That’s not what I’m doing,” she says. These are “couture piñatas,” retailing from $300 and up, and custom-ordered to look like whomever or whatever the customer wants: from exes to celebrities. In fact, there’s a three-foot-tall version of BP CEO Tony Hayward hanging from her ceiling right now, along with a variety of sea-inspired creatures and people for a pirate-themed art show being held at Aphrodite’s, a local organic pie shop. The mermaids and pirates are based on the staff, says Kennedy, and all of them will be smashed at the end of the run. That’s right, even though they’re couture piñatas, you’re still supposed kick the crap out of them.
“Oh I want them to be smashed; that is the purpose. I have some people that order one to break and one to keep, and I charge a fee for putting them back together again.” The cathartic effect of smashing a piñata has an appeal, but Kennedy also thinks that her business has taken off because people connect to the whimsical, fun aspect of the piñata, “I think there’s something from people’s childhood about them that they really like and this is taking that to the next level.”
Not all the piñatas are for profit alone. “I hang them randomly around Vancouver as well, not for promotion, just to see how people will react to having a piñata hanging.” She’s already hung a dragon in Stanley Park in Downtown Vancouver, as well as a merman at the Vancouver Aquarium. Here’s hoping that piñatas take off as the ultimate new form of street art, even if Meaghan’s papier-mâché creations don’t come with any lofty artistic ideals, “they’re piñatas, so they’re not super serious,” she says with a shrug and a laugh.
Words: Marisa Chandler
Photography: Kin Chan
