Not with your eyes

Follow the gentleman dressed in red...

Ubi sunt

We've been very busy at the studio today in prepartion for the 3rd Norwich Body Art Festival. I'm still concerned that I won't have enough to offer but I'm determined to do as much as possible in the very short time we have left.

I've been concentrating mainly on making necklaces but I've also made a couple of pairs of earrings, brooches and some corsage-type pins made from miniature ribcages with Bonnie's outstanding glue-gun skills.

The actual necklace is more of a distressed gold colour, with a type of South American (I believe) Jewel Beetle in the center and vial of a very pretty green Lichen attached to the bottom.

This is a small pendant vial with an octopus tentacle inside. It's adorable. Bonnie, being the Taxidermist, has been the one making the individual vials herself and has been lovely enough to let me use some. She's very clever, that one. I'm going to have to put one together for myself because they are just so fucking cute.

This bottle is bigger than the small vials I've been usuing, which I prefer just because you can do a lot more with them. With this one, I filled the bottom with Lichen and half of a rat mandible, which still has intact the front incisor and the tiny molars at the back. Then I glued a small lightbulb into the cork so it hangs in the middle after the cork is placed in.

Small pins for coats, bags ect... With small Thoracic vertibrae and Dragons blood vials.

And miniature ripcage corsage pins, with dried and varnished rose buds and tiny golden shears.

These are just a few examples of the things we've been working on, I really wanted to bring a little symbiosis into my work though I am concerned I may have completely missed the mark. Oh fie! But that said I still really like how it's come together in a purely aesthetic kind of way. And I suppose when the 'big day' comes around we'll find out just how well it's worked out...

I still have a lot to do by way of paintings and prints, I have quite a few things and several more things planned but it seems there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I want to. And I really want to do it all. Perhaps tomorrow, I will awake to an extra pair of arms and eyes in the back of my head so I can live a double life with a backward me and do 100% more with my time which still, will probably never be enough.

Danse macabre

Just a few small things in the first stages of production. Please excuse the quality.

Dragons blood pendant vial.

Dragons blood and Rose.

 Safflower and Myrhh

 Dragons Blood, Rose, Myrhh.

Only thirtyeight vials left to fill.

Trinkets and tinkering

So, the Norwich Body Art Festival is just over a month away, and as per, I've only just realised this. I'll be hosting a small stall alongside Bonnie Wood of Amore de Mori.com where we'll be offering original art, prints, symbiosis themed t-shirts and trinkets inspired by our adoration of the symbiotic relationships between fauna, flora and fungi, Hoodoo, sacred symbols and 'Memento mori'. It's something i'm actually quite excited about as i'll be trying my hand at making some one-of-a-kind jewelry which is something I've never done before, and within the next few weeks i'll be posting some promo's of the kinds of things we'll have on show.

It should be a super day, a plethora of inky people, a warm atmosphere and of course, we'll most likely be very drunk. Get on it.

Wound

Words like broken bones and bloody teeth.

The Castration of Agdistis

'On one occasion Zeus unwittingly begot by the Earth a superhuman being which was at once man and woman, and was called Agdistis. The gods dreaded it and unmanned it, and from its severed aidoia there grew up an almond-tree'.

An unfortunately contradictory and misconceived creature, left to amateur hands to derogate and disect, and once you've cut it all away we can never touch the stars again.

Come closer, creature

Things have been obtuse, and i've been having these crazy dreams.

I'm almost there, my neck is killing me.

Creatures of old

 Just a couple of things I'm currently working on, I would like to be able to promise a proper progress report but once I've begun painting I just feel so swept up by the bleeding watercolour madness of it all that the tides carry me further out to sea and I don't know where I'll make port until the voyage is through. It's exciting though. I am very excited.

I'm quite a ridiculous thing really, such silly little fantasies of old Gods and flesh eating cannibals.

Agdistis

Wendigo

Sometimes I wish I'd existed when the world was new, rather than the blinding light of the present, when everything was untarnished by what we think we know of ourselves today. Ho hum.

Black Cat Bone

Swallowed deep into the opalescence of the shade, a constant state of midnight veils the world in milky resplendence and static calm, and I am a myth, something old and forgettable, unnoticed and obscured, with Black Cat bone in hand, and Edelweiss in hair, I fade into the azure sea of nebula and everlasting sleep.

And so, it's taken me around four days but I feel comfortable breathing again now. I'm not sure if this is really what I expected but then, things rarely are. It's just a miracle that I didn't immediately hate it the moment I rested my brush. I think I originally thought she'd be more silvery, like a spider web or something, but as usual, I felt totally and utterly overcome by stars, and how fucking insignificant I am.

Psilocybin

Because there are whales in the sea who's teeth are made from 40% plastic and the man with the many teeth stole the lid from my pelvis.

Made of Eyes

The Psilocybin crush...

Shadow puppets

I have some creatures made of eyes, shapeless forms, like shadows that wax and wane with the light, peeking, keening, curious and delicate, and choked with wet hair and necklaces made of bone and baby teeth. Ghosts that stretch across the plenum, as I feel I've been, stretched, and loose to sway with the unfathomable black in the fungal decay of rotting bark.

 I find that lately, I only draw the things that frighten me.

Death of the Toad God

 

I haven't felt capable of doing anything larger than 210x297mm for a while, but have been lucky enough over the last few days to have time enough to entertain my fingers with heathen Gods and Hoodoo magic, gradually progressing to larger mediums, which is refreshing, after feeling so sick creatively over the last month or so with a backlog of tattoo designs. Woe is me and all that jazz.

Perhaps a clearer image is in order when the sun comes back around.

Heathen Gods

Oh, and something else I'm working on...

I find myself more excited by the thought of toads, and her toady little hands.

Live things

Back into the thick of it, i'm trying to put all the pieces in place at the same time. And I'm not happy with it, looking back to the beginning, I feel I should have made a different choice. Colour - urgh.

Nucleus

At the heart of it all there’s always a bruise, a dark spot, the irrevocable mark of a sadness too deep to cut out, everything else is just an afterthought, a collection of Band-Aids to enswathe the swelling rot, to conceal it all while we desperately search for a cure, and I suppose the aspiration is to amputate the gangrenous limbs and enjoy some semblance of reality before our veins go black with eternal sleep, but under the ubiquitous pressing, ours is a shade without exit. Take a deep breath. End of line.