Meet Becca Barnet

Today we’d like to introduce you to Becca Barnet.  She and her team team share their story with us below:

Becca’s work is driven by a fascination with natural history, preservation, and the idea that ANYTHING can be made as long as you put your mind to it!

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration, she also attended the Missouri Taxidermy Institute where she fine-tuned her special knack and patience for taxidermy repair – from cleaning to complete mount renovations.

Ten years at the helm of her company, Sisal Creative, she’s collaborated with designers, dreamt up unthinkable exhibits, and hired skilled craftspeople to aid her core team in making bespoke, site-specific, awe-inspiring art installations.

The challenge of “making anything” is what keeps her going! In fact, Becca is featured as a season-long contestant on NBC’s Making It hosted by Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler. Now streaming on Hulu!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Working for yourself, as a small outfit, can seem and feel fancy, but it’s essentially being a freelance artist with employees and an LLC sticker. There are slow times and busy times, times when I wasn’t sure if you could do it anymore… times when I have a little win and I’m for one second totally convinced I’ve cracked the code to demolish the phrase “starving artist” (haha)… but at the end of the day, there’s nothing I want to do more than put beauty into the world. My whole business model runs on making sure we intake clients in a way where we are able to work seamlessly with them- to make artwork that artistically represents and celebrates their mission statement and aesthetic- all the way down to their DNA.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
From tiny curiosities to grand installations, Sisal Creative can represent your brand with bespoke, immersive design. For each project, we consider all aspects of the desired feeling or response you’re looking to spark in the space. Our unique, widely-varied skills allow us to create, preserve or re-appropriate whatever is needed to produce that experience. Whether you’re starting with a broad vision or a fully branded plan, our studio is equipped to consult on, design, and produce virtually any artistic experience in any media. We believe that every eatery, hotel, office and museum should have the chance to both surprise and delight!

We are most proud of our work re-designing the Natural History Gallery at the Charleston Museum- we repaired over 150 taxidermy mounts AND designed the user interface/experience for the entire gallery. Fun fact – the Charleston Museum is America’s FIRST museum and I had the honor of repairing the ivory-billed woodpecker, passenger pigeon, and Carolina parakeet mounts. (all extinct!)

So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
We will work with anyone who loves what they do and wants to add beauty to their space. If you’re a designer or an artist and need something brought to life, we can make that! If you have no idea what your lobby needs, we will take your DNA, branding, and mission statement and design something that you could never find in a store. No job is too big or too small for us! We have started trying to take on only larger projects, but love repairing those small, meaningful objects for residential clients as well. We’ve done everything from a 40′ tall homage to sweetgrass baskets (hiring a fifth-generation weaver to tell her story on an accompanying plaque and donating all profits to the sweetgrass basket heritage corridor foundation) to sculpting a 30″ model of a tardigrade – the world’s smallest living micro-animal for a museum in the Czech Republic. We’ve repaired a client’s beloved vintage marlin mount and articulated the skeleton of a beloved lost pet. (We don’t actually do pets anymore – it’s a long story).

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sisalcreative.com
• Instagram: @beccabarnet, @sisalcreative

Image Credits
Lizzie Rollins, Landon Neil, Leslie McKellar, Becca Barnet, Alex Waggoner