photo by Rimas Zailskas
“I encourage everyone to participate joyfully in life’s masquerade.” says Paul Hersey.
“I love to see someone put on one of my pieces and suddenly stand more regally, become more radiant, and recognize the divine within themselves.”
Paul was a mild mannered mainframe programmer who loved to dress up for raves and wild parties on the weekend. He started going to Burning Man every summer and making elaborate costumes for it. Doing so, he learned by trial and error how to make them comfortable as well as original.
He experimented with many materials and hit on latex as his perfect medium. People began asking him to make costumes for them.
About this time the double whammy of the dotCom bust and the off-shoring of most mainframe jobs put him out of work.
Instead of retraining in the latest programming language, his wife Jennifer encouraged him to follow his bliss. He has been developing his sculpting and costuming techniques ever since. Organic Armor was born in 2005.
That was 6 years ago. Somehow in this economy, the company has made it this far. Not easy but satisfying.
Paul and Jennifer run the company together. He is the main designer and fabricator, she does everything else. They live in Asheville, North Carolina, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. They travel to summer festivals and cons around the country to sell.
Their work appeals across many subcultures and genres, to all kinds of creative people, many of them performers.
“I am an artist’s artist. ” Paul says. “Most of my customers are creative people of one kind or another. I find my aesthetic comrades in underground culture where people make their own worlds.”
And Jennifer exclaims “Our customers are the coolest!”
A few credits:
The Ramayana Y2k, techno music/acrobatic version of the Hindu epic, winner LA Weekly award
Jackson Frost, Glendale Centre Theater, 2006
Goblin City, indie sci-fi film, 2007
The Mayan Dance Company of Los Angeles, 2006
Lucent Dossier performance troope, for Coachella Music Festival, 2007
Plus many belly dancers, hula hoopers, fire spinners, musicians, burlesque dancers, strippers, stiltwalkers and puppeteers.
photo by Bill Rhodes
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