In the spring of 2006 I had a residency that allowed me access to studio space—a precious commodity in New York City. The long trek from my Brooklyn apartment to the studio, which was on the western-most edge of Chelsea, brought me past the Bridge Gallery, a temporary space designed to house the New York leg of the touring Made in Palestine show. I visited the gallery many times over the course of its three-month run and had the opportunity to sit with all of the pieces. A few stood out for me, Rana Bishara’s Blindfolded History (2003), Noel Jabbour’s Vacant Seats series (2000-2001), Nida Sinnokrot’s Rubber Coated Rocks (2002), and Emily Jacir’s Crossing Surda (2003), among them. But I kept returning to Mary Tuma’s Homes for the Disembodied (2000, 2003), a massive installation composed of five dress-forms made from a single, continuous piece of fabric, 50 meters long, hung high from the ceiling. The simple image haunted me but it wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me I could reach out to the artist and tell her as much. Mary and I started corresponding through the magic of social media and we discussed our work, being Arab-American, Palestine, 9/11, Barbie, love, New York, almost dying, Christianity and lamb testicles, among other things. What follows is an edited transcript of two of our longer conversations, published with her permission.

— Joseph Shahadi, June 2012

 

Homes for the Disembodied, Mary Tuma, 2000, image courtesy of The Station Museum.

 

Joseph Shahadi: What drew you to textile-based work in the first place?

Mary Tuma: Love, I guess. My mother sewed and knitted, crocheted, etc. and I was a bit dramatic… loved dress-ups at a young age, and Barbie. I used to make a lot of clothes for my Barbies.

JS: Ha. Barbie gets a bad rap but I suppose she did you a good turn then.

MT: [pause] The writer suggested that it was because Barbie never deferred to Ken. I believe that is very possibly true.

JS: I was a houseguest once (as an adult) and ended up “playing Barbies” with their young daughter. I kept trying to impose a narrative, to make something happen and she kept stopping me. Finally I realized that—for her—“Barbies” wasn’t about going to the Big Party (which was the story she was making up as we played) it was getting ready to go. She was unconcerned with arriving. It was an interesting lesson. Once I surrendered to the idea that it was sort of endless and open it became fun.

But before that I almost ruined it by trying to force too much “action” on her play. She was very patient about correcting me though.

MT: Funny! Getting ready. Not doing, but preparing… that’s interesting… I think there is something to that—about making oneself presentable (for women)…Hmmm….

I just remember if I wanted a date (as Barbie) Ken would automatically appear.

And when it was over, it was over.

JS: Yeah, poor Ken. He really was a prop, wasn’t he? Like a car or a house.

MT: Yes! Maybe less important than the house or car!

 

The Three Pillars: Liberty, Unity, Voice (LUV), Mary Tuma, 2012, image by Abed Al Khadiri

JS: So you describe yourself as a feminist then? As a political identity?

MT: Absolutely. It is my first first-person. I have for a very long time been looking at art vs. craft as a feminist issue. I think that territory is changing, but not very fast.

JS: Interesting. Can you say more about that?

MT: Well, a lot of people who work with textiles are making first rather than communicating ideas first. So I would likely think of them as crafters. This is true with paint though, too, but it is rarely discussed.

Because I work in fibers, I have long stressed the undoing of craft in my work.

I use giant stitches or “appropriate craftsmanship” to talk about my subject. Not all pieces evidence this, but it’s a trend… undoing is what women fear most, perhaps. But I try to make a point of it.

JS: Why do you think that is? The fear of undoing I mean?

MT: Oh, it ties right back into what we were discussing about Barbie… the idea of getting ready. It’s like the “Peace Process”… it’s never meant to go anywhere… it’s just a process… with women it’s perhaps about upkeep. Did she “let herself go?”…. Well, what if she fucking wanted to let herself go?

JS: Huh, I never really thought about how poetic that phrase was before, “let herself go.”

MT: Yeah… it’s like we aren’t supposed to explore our nature…. and just be. Anyhow, with art and craft this is a feminist issue. How women can express themselves.

JS: So you think that the slippage between art and craft is policed along gender lines? Am I getting that right?

MT: Art and craft is often policed along gender lines, and class lines, with art being strictly a part of upper classes and craft a part of working classes, traditionally of course… but we tend to have internalized some of this tradition… [But] I should say too that I’m not against craft in any way. I had a conversation with a very well known male Palestinian artist who said that the embroideries the Palestinian women make, that have become iconic to the Palestinian population and are appropriated by Palestinian artists, are not art. He did not even think about it, nor would even think about it. I thought that was really interesting.

JS: Hm. That is interesting, especially since there is such traffic between contemporary Arab artwork and calligraphy. But that is perhaps seen as a masculine expression (as opposed to embroidery)?

MT: That is a very good point about the calligraphy. Done with a brush and not with a needle?

I’m not really asking people to consider the place of women directly with my work…

I’m just saying –here are these materials, these ideas, this way of communicating…. they are feminist, feminine, unapologetic…

JS: My perception of your work is that you are situating the larger questions you address within a feminist universe by using craft that is associated with women to make them. Is that right?

MT: Yes, that’s right.

I love that textiles are associated with women in our culture… even though so many men around the world are textile makers. It’s usually an economic thing… as soon as there is money to be made men take it over.

JS: Earlier you referenced the (ironically named) “peace process”. Can you talk about the role Palestine plays in your identity and in your art practice? I notice you have a section for Palestine-themed work on your site…

MT: Palestine is a really big part of my adult identity, but it wasn’t a part of my childhood. I was never taught in my home about the Palestinian situation and I remember being in grade school and chosen to represent Israel in the Model UN, because my Dad was from there. That was when I started to learn about the situation. I was really embarrassed and a bit angry that my parents hadn’t told me much. I guess they were trying to protect me.

As an adult I have spent a lot of time in Palestine and am learning Arabic.

I feel so passionately about the Palestinian people and the political situation, but I’m also keenly aware that I’m feeling those things from an American-Palestinian position.

I don’t have to live there (although I would like to) and I can go if I choose to. I can pick and choose my experiences and so on.

I feel like I’m also in a good position to do work that talks about Palestine for an American audience as well as an international audience. In some ways, I’m a little surprised when Palestinians like the work I do– it means I got something right, I guess. But I’m really not able to speak from the same place that say Rana Bishara can… I’m much more of an outsider/insider. There is still a sense of the exotic for me with Palestine. I love my family there and I love being there, but it still feels like “there” instead of “here” if that makes sense.

This is of course a really interesting place to be. There is some sort of theme that has driven my life… this idea of searching for my true home… it’s one of the topics of all my favorite children’s books, a repeating theme of favorite songs, movies, etc. the idea of being a misfit and a seeker.

Seeking a home or reestablishing a home is a big part of my connection with Palestine.

The idea of homelessness is so profound for a whole people.

I have come to believe that a lot of my own homeless feeling has to do with the life/death phenomenon, and have come to connect with my own spiritual beliefs of life after death, reincarnation and the life of the spirit. This gets into a whole other territory, but really helps explain Homes for the Disembodied. It’s the one piece where I’ve been able to express the political situation and my personal spiritual beliefs combined.

JS: This is very interesting to me. I had a similar relationship with Lebanon as a kid—and for me as an artist and as a person generally I have grown into an appreciation of the uniqueness of my situation as an Arab/ American– in the culture but not of it. I suppose I feel like an insider/outsider in America. Even though I am as American as apple pie in many, many ways…

MT: Me too! I definitely feel like an outsider in the US. So funny. See? No home!

Makes a person wonder what is melting in the melting pot.

JS: Exactly. I feel this very acutely around Palestine in particular because the discourse is so caught up in US and Israeli national mythology…

MT: Yes. And I get so sick and tired of –if Palestine, therefore Israel…Whereas in my mind, Palestine exists so independently of Israel. I feel I have to travel through Israel to get to Palestine, but once I’m there, I’m there.

 

Unsung Heroes, Mary Tuma, detail, image by Diane Davis

JS: Can you locate this sense of homelessness (both in the sense of exile and the metaphysical sense you describe) in other works of yours? Is Homes for the Disembodied the best example of that you have made so far?

MT: It probably is. My first piece, which is now lost, is called Miscarriage. It is very much about loss and emptiness… a falling-away of dreams, etc. I think it resides in that same emotional field. I’ve done some pieces lately that I’m calling Spirit Lanterns. These are meant as homes for lost spirits in the same way as Homes for the Disembodied. I’m also just starting newer pieces titled Spirit Homes, where I’m working once again with the dress form and building off of a similar theme. These newer pieces are more about spirits who have lost their way. They are not political in the same way.

JS: How so?

MT: Well, Homes for the Disembodied was originally made in Palestine for the Al Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem. It had that “real estate” factor. I used it literally to take back a property within Occupied Territory for the spirits of those who had been driven out and died before they could return.

JS: Wow.

MT: Yeah, it was an occupation within an occupation!

JS: I see. We have talked about “home” and “homelessness” in a Palestinian and metaphysical sense but I wonder if you can tell me about “the disembodied.”

This is key for me because I am a “body” guy: I am most interested in issues around the flesh and corporeality—and on the flipside with absence. I was drawn to your work before I knew what it was called but that element “the disembodied” is a big pull for me as an artist, scholar and audience.

MT: Well I suppose there are many ways one can be disembodied. Many of us understand that we are not our bodies, but reside within them…

Much like we live on the land.

JS: Is that how you think of yourself? As residing within your body?

MT: Land and body to me are very connected. Because I’m trained as a clothing designer I often think of pattern paper and clothing patterns as representations much like maps. Yes, I do feel I reside within my body. I feel a strong loving connection with my body but watching it change and age, I know it is very temporary.

I had a sort of revelation when I was very young, incidentally, standing in front of my closet and trying to decide what to wear. The revelation was that the soul or spirit is too vast and too strong to ever die. It was weird. I was like 10 or something and nobody I knew believed in reincarnation, but I knew it from then on. It was/is perhaps the only thing I’ve never questioned in my life. From then on.

Anyhow, disembodied could also be separated from one’s land. Separated from an identity based in the land.

The existence of the Palestinian people is also something that comes up a lot. Some people deny that we exist at all, right? So we are disembodied in another way…

JS: That is really interesting. I remember watching my mom making clothes using those patterns you got in a paper envelope in the 1970s. Butterick Patterns? I am smiling thinking of it… but of course they were like maps. I hadn’t made the connection before. Patterns as maps and clothes as the land… So you have had the metaphysical grounding for this piece in place since you were a child? Even before you had an understanding of yourself in relation to Palestine?

MT: Yeah, for a long time I kept trying to forget the metaphysical, but it just kept popping up. It would be a lot easier to just focus on the political maybe. But it doesn’t feel fulfilling to me […] I used to love sewing with those patterns. I spent hours at the fabric store going through the pattern catalogs. It really was/is like mapping an identity… flesh and clothing are really connected for me. An empty dress implies absence and for me, once the dress is sheer it begins to be like a memory or a shadow…

JS: Yes, I sensed that when I saw it. So the empty dresses refer back to the absent bodies that have been displaced, exiled, murdered by the occupation?

MT: Yes. They refer to what was as well as providing temporary housing. They are definitely meant to memorialize those absent.

JS: Can politics and metaphysics really be separated? Earlier when we were talking about craft I was remembering that several women artists work in an unconscious way–Schneemann and Beecroft actually both work this way– receiving images from the unconscious without forcing a particular “why” on them. The politics just come.

MT: Hmm. I tend to torture myself. Lots of self-questioning and self-doubt. But you are right about the politics and metaphysics being connected.

I did some pieces a few years ago where I took existing dresses and cut away all but the seams… called Unsung Heroes… it was something like taking away the flesh and leaving the bones.

JS: Yes, I saw those online. I love them. I was really aware of the cutting away as part of the work. It was visceral for me.

MT: Thanks so much. They are really hard to do, actually. I’ve made so many that die in the process.

JS: Die. Heh. You sound like a mad surgeon.

MT: I feel a bit that way!

JS: Seriously though there is something about the violence in all of these works too. These absences are not benign. They are the result of violence. A kind of amputation, I think, that haunts these works.

MT: Yes, particularly with the Unsung Heroes. Lots of anger and violence. Wow. Thank you. I love that. I love it and it disturbs me.

JS: I guess the memorial aspect of “Homes…” places the violence of the occupation at a remove from the work… but since it is ongoing and people keep dying it is also very current.

MT: It makes me feel the pieces are working far beyond what I intended for them.

JS: You can’t really build a memorial to the victims of an ongoing crisis, can you?

MT: That is a very provocative question. I will think about it.

Mary and I spoke again a few months later—over a shaky Skype connection that imposed a series of virtual hiccups into our conversation. She was on vacation in California with her family and I was at home in Brooklyn.

MT: I just asked my father if he knows any Shahadis. He said “many”… He has a cousin who is a Shahadi. But he doesn’t know any in Philadelphia.

JS: Yeah, Shahadi is like “Smith” in Lebanon. We are everywhere.

MT: It’s a much prettier name than Smith! I looked at your website. The work is amazing.

JS: That’s so nice of you to say. Thank you.

MT: I thought you had a mustache until I saw your website!

JS: Why? Do I “sound” like I have a mustache?

MT: You have a mustache in your Facebook picture! Also Skype picture.

JS: Ah, okay… yeah, that was more a scruffy beard. Sometimes I just let it go. It’s like when you stop mowing the lawn and a few weeks later it looks like no one lives there…

MT: Not your art mustache, as on your website?

JS: Ha. No, the piece you are referring to is called Self Portrait with DNA (Sand N*gger) and I made it by smearing my semen on a large digital C-print of my face and covering it with my hair to make a beard on the surface of the image. The one in my Facebook pic is just growing out of my face.

Dino Dinco from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions had invited me to participate in a show called “Gutted” in 2010 but I couldn’t get from New York to LA to perform in person. At first I proposed a real-time video thing but that was too complicated so I decided to go with something more… low tech. Seriously though, I wanted to see if I could give him something that would evoke my presence even though I was on the opposite coast. So that’s what I came up with.

 

Self-Portrait With DNA (Sand N*gger), 2010 Joseph Shahadi, Installation (Digital C-print, semen, hair). Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

 

MT: Isn’t it hard living in New York? I lived there for three years in the 80’s and almost went nuts because of no private green space.

JS: Yes, it’s hard. But at this point I can’t really imagine living anywhere else.

MT: That’s the best place to be… stop imagining and just do what you do. I still imagine going/living in New York for the sake of my work. I wonder if it would make a difference?

JS: It made a difference for me. But that may just have been timing. Of course there are downsides to living here too. I wish I could afford more space to live and work… I keep dreaming of making these big pieces but it’s hard without a studio of my own.

MT: You do not have a studio? Did you have one as a student?

JS: Nope. Or different kind of studio I guess. I trained as an actor. My practice shifted and became more visual later… My progression went something like: acting, directing, writing, experimental theatre, performance art, photography, installation, works on paper… But conceptually my work is always rooted in performance.

MT: Ah…an actor!

JS: I grew up in Philly and used to come to the city all the time to perform and show work. But I resisted relocating completely for a long time because I was really comfortable there. I had networks in place, an audience. I knew moving to New York would mean starting over. And it did. But that hasn’t been bad for me, or my work.

MT: Good. Yes, it’s good to get there when you are young and have the fight in you. That sounds pathetic, maybe but long-term teaching can wear one down, even if you like it. I was there in the height of the crack era, and it was dangerous. I felt in danger almost every day. I know it has changed since, and I should probably give it another go. How many years are you now in NYC?

JS: I moved to New York for good on February 1st, 2001. Just in time for the fun to start.

MT: Holy crap! I can see that living through those days could make one either head for the hills, or buckle down and commit to the place.

JS: That is exactly right… I was actually supposed to be in Tower One that day, at Windows On The World, the restaurant right at the top. It’s pure luck that I am still alive.

MT: Wow. You were supposed to be there? I’m pretty speechless.

JS: As melodramatic as that sounds, it’s true. So yes, living through that day—as in remaining alive— gave me a new perspective on… well, everything.

MT: Were you delayed? Did you know people who were killed? You don’t need to answer that of course.

JS: No, thankfully. At the time I was working at a private foundation in Midtown and we had a work party scheduled there. It was changed at the last minute because of a Board Meeting. That morning as the news was hitting the reminders started blinking on everyone’s computers “Windows On The World, September 11, 2001.” It was… a very weird feeling. When we finally had that party a month or so later it was in a restaurant that had been a bank and we ate in a dining room that was a former vault. The irony was lost on no one.

MT: The whole thing was so unbelievable. My sister had just gotten off the train from Brooklyn and was walking towards 14th St. She called to ask me what had happened because she saw all the smoke and people were panicking… I told her to walk back across the Brooklyn bridge and she ended up doing that with thousands of others. We had classes that day, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was all too surreal.

JS: Yeah, I did the same thing. I was among thousands who fled across the 59th St. Bridge on foot. I lived in Queens then. You’d have liked my old neighborhood— plenty of green, lots of trees. Anyway, I think 9/11 really forced my hand as an artist.

Like you I was raised in a very assimilated way. My immigrant grandparents were brave, smart people who remade their lives far away from the mountains of Lebanon. But the choices they made reverberate for me today. For example they forbade my father and his siblings from speaking Arabic in the house so they all lost the language and could not pass it along to me. Now, with my North American accent and affect, fair skin and green eyes I move fairly seamlessly through spaces of white power so you might say that the project of my family –to assimilate worked. Of course I’ve always experienced Anti-Arab racism anyway, sometimes from strangers and sometimes from “friends.” But post-9/11 I felt physically vulnerable in a way that my grandparents—who’d had a cross burned on their lawn—must have felt. Unlike them though I had no faith that my ability to be a “model minority” would protect me. It became clear to me that there was no performance of whiteness successful enough, no cultural disappearance complete enough, for me to be safe. There was no way I couldn’t begin to address that in my work. I became preoccupied with surveillance, shame and exposure, authority and voyeurism. And the body, always the body.

My mom died in ’99 after a long illness and I’d kind of floated for a while after that. I’d broken up with my girlfriend and I just felt like I had no footing… but 9/11 changed that, for better or worse. Or better and worse. I no longer had the luxury to be so sad and unfocused (if I ever really did), not when the consequences for simply being are so dire.

MT: Right. Get a footing or else. I can see that. Sorry about your mom.

JS: Thanks. Me too.

MT: Less than a month after 9/11 I had a heart attack. I was only 40 and almost died. It really shocked the hell out of me in several ways. I learned first off that I wasn’t afraid to die. I also had to face what I wanted my life/work to be about and made some commitments then that I’m glad for even now. Homes for the Disembodied was made just before in the summer of 2000. It was made in a time when peace in Palestine/Israel seemed imminent. Lots of people — Arabs and Jews and internationals were drinking together at the hotel bars that summer in Jerusalem. I had also made a piece called Resurfacing Palestine that was a collection of stones collected in Jerusalem and a small textile map with threads connecting. I’m trying to remember the sequence of events… was it that year or the next year that Ariel Sharon went to Al Aqsa with his army and the next intifada began?

JS: Can’t remember off the top of my head… It is so hard to keep all the false starts in the peace process straight… September 2000?

MT: Well, the heart attack was partially due to having my heart broken. By a man, and also by the end of that chance for peace, and fear too after 9/11. I was terrified. Terrified that we’d be treated the way the Japanese had been in WWII

Yeah. I think there isn’t an Arab-American anywhere who wasn’t riveted by the event.

JS: I thought internment camps were inevitable. And I remember looking around and thinking, “When they knock on my door who will speak up for me?” It was such a feeling of despair and loneliness. Actually, part of me still thinks it is inevitable. Although I think they are smarter about it now… there are a million legal ways to keep track of us now… they don’t need to build a corral around us when we can be legally detained a few at a time with no access to counsel, forever. Although if you want to make a group of Arab Americans nervous get us all together for some kind of meeting and then shut the door… I’m always like “Heh, I hope that opens from the inside…”

I don’t know if it was news in your part of the world but we found out this year that the NYPD have been tracking Arab and Muslim University students based on our online activities up and down the east coast. When I was in grad school at NYU we used to joke about it among ourselves—but it is a whole other ballgame to know for sure that they were (are?) really monitoring us…

MT: Yes. I do remember hearing about that… not particularly about students… but NYPD infiltrating Arab American groups in Brooklyn. I used to live just down from Atlantic Ave. I was really glad at the time to be living in North Carolina. It felt like it was far out of the way and all, but it has since become the second banking capital after New York.

 

The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People, 2010, Joseph Shahadi Installation (lamb hearts and testes,sewing and upholstery needles, straight pins, black thread). 49B Studio

 

JS: When I made The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People and Self Portrait with DNA (Sand N*gger) I was really thinking about the attack on Arab and Muslim male bodies in spaces like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. There were female prisoners too but the images of their torture and imprisonment were suppressed, while the images of Arab men stripped naked, sexually humiliated and covered in shit were displayed everywhere.

MT: Have you seen the images of women there? I would want to see that. Makes me so angry to think about it. Abu Ghraib. These wars.

JS: Those images had a huge impact on me as an Arab-American man in particular. I did a lot of research about the torture protocols at Guantanamo and so many of them were designed to emasculate. Rape is absolutely used as a tool of war by the US in those spaces and the silence about it is deafening.

MT: It’s hard to believe this sort of thing happens these days. It’s Medieval at best. And yet, this is our condition. We are basically fucked. Tell me about The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People.

 

The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People, 2010, Joseph Shahadi Installation (lamb hearts and testes,sewing and upholstery needles, straight pins, black thread). 49B Studio

JS: That piece is made of lamb hearts and testicles that I pierced with hundreds of sewing, upholstery needles, and straight pins and wrapped in black thread.

MT: Lamb hearts! I kept looking at those, thought maybe ceramic? How did he get them to look like that? So real, so glossy…

JS: There were glossy because they were fresh. They were arranged on a table covered with white cotton tablecloths. It was funny watching people bound over to them because they thought they were a group of shiny, pretty objects and then get grossed out when they realized they were real. They changed a lot throughout the day. The blood drained out of them and they got really matte. And the tiny veins and arteries got really dark. It was kind of amazing to watch.

MT: Wow. That piece was really moving. And I thought at first needles, but then also nails. And of course that brings up Christianity.

JS: Yes, I think in the end it is a really Christian image. They are sort of crucified. The Sacred Heart, too. I’m a Maronite and it is fair to say that Catholic art had an impact on me. You look at enough of those statues writhing in pain when you are growing up…

MT: Yes! The writhing…. I love the idea of people running up to them and then being disgusted. Very nice. Would make a great video — time lapse… watching them go from shiny to matte.

JS: Well they didn’t have to get that close after a certain point in the day because they started to smell. They were literally rotting.

MT: Yes. The body needs that spirit to keep it together. It’s glue for the flesh. I love that I thought “so real!” about your lamb hearts.

JS: And testes. Literally every single guy who saw the piece said the same thing: “Those are lamb balls? They are so big…”

MT: Haha sort of makes one wonder, eh? I don’t think I could work with actual flesh. The closest I have come is hair. When did you make them?

 

The Torture Commissioned By The Emperor For The Good Of The People, 2010, Joseph Shahadi Installation (lamb hearts and testes,sewing and upholstery needles, straight pins, black thread). 49B Studio

JS: It was the summer of 2010. I’d been planning the piece for about a year and then I was invited to show something at the HOME-LAND show at Studio 49B in Bushwick Brooklyn. I worked with Makram Hamdan, the artist who curated, to realize it for the show. Working with flesh timing was really crucial, I had to work quickly once I had everything assembled and then stored in a cooler and refrigerated overnight.

I bought the meat all at once from a halal butcher in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. You should have seen me trying to explain to him what I was going to do with them.

MT: I hate that! I once bought a shopping cart full of old weight scales at a thrift store, and trying to explain was just so painful.

JS: I think if you just say “I’m an artist” and look meaningfully away they don’t know how to respond and they just shut up.

MT: Or you get, “Oh, you are going to paint them?” Duh.

JS: Yeah. Landscapes. I’m going to paint landscapes on them.

MT: I suppose artists really should document the collection of the things they are working with… And the lamb hearts… would they have been in the garbage, or do people use them? Do people eat… balls?

JS: I assume so… they were selling the balls shrink-wrapped in little Styrofoam trays. They brought me the hearts from the back.

MT: What an image. You must find out, though… it’s very compelling… the thought of those little balls in Styrofoam… truthfully, though, if you eat meat, it’s pretty much all the same. Just emotionally different.

JS: I haven’t eaten meat since 1988 so it is all the same to me. Although I was surprised at how dense they were. I couldn’t really pierce them; I had to slide the needles into the skin. You think lambs are these cute fluffy things but it turns out that they have giant, impenetrable balls. So, there you go.