Funky Monkey Planter

We were all geeks in the eighties. This is not an admission so much as a demographic fact about the people who started this studio, and somewhere in most of our closets, at some point, was a t-shirt with a cartoon monkey on it doing something a real monkey would never do, worn without a trace of irony and with the full, uncomplicated conviction of a person who genuinely believed the shirt said something true about them.

The funky monkey is a quiet homage to that shirt and that era and that conviction. It is funky in the original sense of the word, the sense that existed before funky became a thing you had to put in quotation marks and explain to people who were not there. Back then funky was not a brand or a vibe or a carefully curated aesthetic. It was just what you called something that was a little odd and a little joyful and completely unbothered about whether either of those things was currently fashionable.

That is the pot. It is glazed ceramic, it wipes clean, and there is no drainage hole, so it is happiest with a succulent or a small cactus, or working as a cover pot for a nursery container you lift out to water. It will sit on a shelf and be slightly too much in exactly the way the shirt was slightly too much, and it will not apologize for it, because we are not going to either. We wore the shirt. We earned the nostalgia. We are allowed.