Feast and Courtship explores the realm of the fantastic - phantasmagoric stories of otherworldly creatures and uncharted topographies. During early experiments with a resin substance known, aptly enough, as Fantasy Film, I created a series of photogram studies. The studies resembled microscopic slide photographs, evoking the cellular and arterial interior of organisms. Influenced by the photogram studies, I sought to articulate with pencil the uncanny resemblance of the study’s structures to images from the field of biology. As the drawings progressed, they eventually revealed the contours of skeletal, fossil-like remains: fragments of a wing, a skull, or a ribcage (In Foul and in Prey). Before too long, I began to realize that these creatures I had uncovered were interacting with one another, and--to my amusement and horror--seemed to be in the process of copulation or cannibalism or both at the same time. Within the clinical confines of the graphite drawings, there is a dark world of rapturous mating and dripping entrails (A Party When the Wolf Comes Home and The Mortivores). My work seemed to have taken on the trappings of a pseudo forensic pathologist or an amateur fossil hunter.
The sculpture was created by dripping driftwood in the same Fantasy Film substrate that launched my initial studies. The resin material therefore became both a starting point and a finishing coat, the sculptures becoming a manifestation of elements of the drawing. They most often resemble nightmarish fossils pulled out of tar pits, while Love Beyond the Pale evokes entwined, mating skeletons, decayed and frozen in time.
The work shares Edward Gorey’s taste for interspersing the comic with the macabre; it also shares his penchant for the Victorian Era’s wallpaper patterns, cabinets of curiosities, and predilection for ghost stories. Inspired by Emmet Gowin’s aerial photographs, the drawings also have a topographical reading, echoing ancient, hand-drawn maps, or even the obsessively detailed fictitious maps that preface most science fiction and fantasy genre novels.
Feast and Courtship details the macro and microscopic topography of gothic amalgamations of unknown and yet vaguely familiar creatures. This work investigates the process of decay and the pleasure and pain of transformation, as membranes are perforated and the borders of our interior dissipate even as they recreate themselves. It is a continuation of my interest in the conflicts within the fragile, mutable and fugitive state of our interior landscape.