A visit from the goblin king

Meeting remarkable cats in the name of art

I had a very important guest at the weekend, and I was in a bit of a flap getting ready for his arrival. Would Gary like the snacks I’d bought? Should I put the heating on so he’d be warm enough? I hoped he wouldn’t mind that the place was a bit of a mess. What if he didn’t like me? I was more nervous than when I met the Queen (Elizabeth; I haven’t got my head around Camilla being the role-holder yet). Thankfully, when he arrived, Gary made himself at home and, once he was out of his coat, rubbed his almost-hairless body against my hand, purring like a small, throbbing engine. 

Gary - Gary the Sphynx AKA Gary Baldy* - was visiting so I could find out more about bald cats. He was chaperoned by his owner Lucy, and as he tucked into a handful of catnip, chicken and cheddar-flavour cat biscuits, she told me all about life with Gary, laughing when I compared his arrival to hosting Royalty. “A visit from the goblin king, more like!”

A state visit from Gary the Sphynx

I had hoped to sketch Gary too, but he zipped around from sofa to rug to window so quickly that it was all I could do to listen to Lucy and take pictures of him, half of which were blurry from his high-speed circuits of the room. I’m currently working on a soft sculpture of a bald cat and needed not only reference photos, but a sense of a Sphynx cat in the flesh. “Like a peach,” is how Lucy described the texture of his body, and she was absolutely right. Soft, a bit fuzzy and so much nicer than I’d imagined. His tail was slightly furry, as was a dark patch of hair above his nose - what Lucy calls his mohican. He was muscular, with a supremely expressive tail and lovely wrinkles of skin at his neck and arm (leg?) pits.

Edgar (front) and Marcus relaxing at home

Earlier in the week I’d had the pleasure of meeting Edgar and Marcus, two Cornish Rex cats who were of a similar build to Gary, but covered with a downy layer of super-fine hair. This excellent duo, one dark, one light, belong to an acquaintance of my friend Michelle. When I first put out a plea on Instagram for bald cats, she’d suggested they might model for me. Walking to their flat from mine, I was reminded of the many times I headed to an interviewee’s house when I was a features writer. It’s such a privilege to get to see someone else’s home, which is never not interesting, and to talk to them in the place where they feel comfortable. It felt even nicer that this time I was off the clock - there was no office I needed to rush back to - and that I was meeting remarkable cats in the name of art.

Edgar: reserved at first, but won over by treats

Edgar and Marcus appeared when called by their owner Nick, pouring themselves down the ladder that led to their bed. So slinky and sinuous, it’s hard to believe that they are actually a bit klutzy. “They have hardly any whiskers,” Nick explained, “which is why I think they miss-time their jumps.” I didn’t see evidence of anything but elegance from Edgar, although Marcus did do a bit of snuffling and gobbling when I offered him some treats. Edgar looked on from a distance with his extraordinary blue eyes gleaming in his pale, golden face before deciding that I was a friend (or at least a food provider) rather than a foe. 

Marcus’s crinkles and downy hair

My tutors had suggested that I should go and meet some bald, or baldish, cats if I was going to make work about them. To watch them, to draw and to photograph them, but also to find out more about how their owners saw their pets, and what other people thought of them, too.

Because, while I’m fascinated by these cats, a straw poll of friends and family, as well as the cat owners I spoke to, suggests that they’re not universally adored - owing to the fact that they are, if I may, quite weird looking. “Some of my friends tell me that they don’t like the look of my cats,” Nick told me. “Especially Edgar, as he is very alien-esque.”

Lucy insisted that any doubters she’d encountered were quickly won over when they actually met Gary (“people think they don’t like bald cats, but then they meet him”) and felt his star quality: “He’s been in the music video for a song that got into the Top 40!” She did admit, though, that she finds the pink Sphynxes a bit weird “like raw chicken.” From these devoted owners, I learnt that cats have 32 muscles in each of their ears and that Sphynxes’ normal body temperature runs about four degrees warmer than other cats. That being said, they need heat pads and blankets to compensate for their lack of fur. 

I find that once you become interested in something, and put your feelers out, the universe, fate or pure luck tends to lend a helping hand. Not only did I find Lucy and Nick (and Gary, Edgar and Marcus), I met someone at college who has a Sphynx, and she described her cat as being peach-like, too, as well as “a drama queen, and she likes to be so close to me I think she’d get inside my skin if she could”. I found out that a dear friend’s neighbour has one. And while I had a failed mission trying to track down two Sphynx cats owned by a gallery director in East London, I now have a date in the diary to go and meet Cordelia and Edward. I feel that if you’re setting out in a particular direction, and make an effort, something will always come out of it.

Arriving in Margate in advance of my audience with Gary, I heard about a cat-themed festival and exhibition just in time to go to its opening. It was a delight, with work from artists of all ages, disciplines and skills plastering the walls - much of it for sale, but some of it too precious to its creators to be parted from.

"Red Flag” by Jemma Channing was part of the Festival of Cats exhibition

As was “Catwalk” by Elizabeth Cake

I take inspiration from these kinds of coincidences. The fact that I’m making a Sphynx cat, which will be presented in a pram as a meditation on childlessness, is because I had a nudge in the right direction. While I was trying to decide what to make my final project of the year about, I was commissioned to write a turnaround book review (this is journalism speak, and just means as quickly as possible) Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World (the review is here, but it’s paywalled). I’d been looking through the ideas list I keep on my phone - shout out to

Bonnie Radcliffe

for hers, which she calls “idea soup” - and wondering what to commit to. The cat book was just the push I needed to put something on the list into production. 

Basically, I imagined the horror of peeping into someone’s cat carrier and seeing a baby inside. Could the reverse, a skin-pink cat in a pram, be as unnerving? We bred these creatures to be hairless, vulnerable and reliant on humans, yet many people find them uncanny or freakish. A mother holding her child, skin to skin, is the most natural thing in the world, but a woman holding a bald cat to her breast is abhorrent (or horribly fascinating, if you’re me). Women with cats have a bad rep societally, being labelled as mad cat ladies, cat hoarders or, historically, witches. So I wanted to play with these thoughts - love, childlessness, judgement, attraction and repulsion - and see what happened.

Weird cat in progress

I told Lucy about some of this, and she said that she sometimes felt like she was Gary’s mother, he was her baby, and that holding him skin to skin was lovely, particularly when he was younger. Now, she said, he wasn’t as cuddly, although if he was chilly he was very happy to be cradled. She didn’t dress him up, unlike some Sphynx owners, except to put a coat on him when he was going outdoors, and in the summer, if he’s going in the garden, she sprays him with baby SPF.

Lucy and Gary

I loved how much she adores Gary, who clearly feels the same way about her. Nick told me about his delight at curling up with his cats at night, with Marcus on his feet and Edgar at his head. Since we’re at a point now at college where we choose our own adventures, and set off on creative quests without tutors giving us a set task, I’m happy with my choices, and feel lucky to have met these hairless and the barely haired creatures, along with their owners, who took time out of their lives to introduce me to them. Sphynxes and Cornish Rexes aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, but I’m Team Weird Cat and proud.

(*in the UK, a Garibaldi is a biscuit: a low-ranking cookie made of two thin layers of dough with currants sandwiched in between.)