We recently connected with Martin Molloy and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Martin, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Just before I turned 30, I found myself looking for work and unsure of my direction. I saw an ad for a position in my industry (market research) in the local alternative newspaper and while it was entry level, it felt like a start up trying to find its way. I took the job (at a huge pay cut) and it was the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m now the Senior Partner, helped build a business from the ground up, and have stayed engaged in my professional career everyday for the last 20 years. At that point in my life I could have found a better paying job with more stability but the reward would have been much smaller.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My day job is in market research. I’m a qualitative researcher and the Senior Partner at W5, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina. On the surface it might not seem like a creative career but it balances the day-to-day running of a small business and creatively figuring out how to better understand people. Often we’re faced with a problem and need to figure out a way to talk to people and understand what they do, what they think, what they want, what they like. Often they don’t know the answers to these questions and behave reflexively.

In creative endeavors, I’m relatively new. I started in 2018 making photocopied flyers for a friend’s band. Scissors, tape, and copy machines like it was 1990 all over again. Since then I’ve added more. More materials, more color, more mediums. Being untrained brings a freedom I don’t always have in my professional life. It’s all an experiment to see if I can make visual art that matches the ideas in my head or to see where things might end up. It’s taught me a lot about persistence and failure. I feel like every day in the studio is a lesson in failure that drives more experimentation.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I might be in the minority but NFTs and AI (the other “hot topic”) seem both fleeting and dangerous to me. The idea of a virtual world with assets, ownership, etc. is pointless to me. We live in the real world where people make art, love, experience loss, live! NFTs feel like tulips to me. Eventually someone is going to be left with nothing of value, having lost money and time. The idea that digital art and digital “intelligence” are the future are just foreign to me. You lose ownership with both. I can hold a piece of art on canvas or paper. I can hold a photograph. NFTs will vanish the second some distant tech overlord pulls the plug on their servers or the idea. I look forward to them vanishing for good.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

It stretches my brain everyday. It’s a different way to communicate something about me, what I observe, or truth in the world. When I was younger I thought I would write creatively. Turns out I’m a good business writer but not in the realm of poetry or prose. Visual arts provide an opportunity for me to communicate the thoughts bottled up in my mind in a satisfying way.

Contact Info:

• Website: toiletjackets.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toiletjackets/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marty-molloy-2a0b232/

Image Credits
All images, Martin Molloy