"Where the hell have you been?"

Like The Cicada

For 13 years, 17 years, cicadas remain dormant, deep beneath the earth, waiting. They emerge from their caverns only in their final weeks, to find each other, to fuck, to die. 

And when they emerge from their long wait in darkness they come out singing.

And they go singing to the grave.

During the early days of the COVID pandemic I made a series of still life arrangements involving cicadas. And I wrote a lot about how the life cycle of the cicada functions as a metaphor for personal growth and the realization of potential. 

I didn’t realize how meaningful this metaphor would eventually become for me.

Although I did my best to maintain my mailing list and social media presence throughout the pandemic, this schedule eventually became untenable. My partner works in healthcare; during the early stages of COVID living they were seldom home and I was alone with our 3-year-old for months on end. Eventually the monotony and stress and difficulty of balancing work with caring for a kid got the better of me. I went silent for quite some time.

I apologize for the long absence; I usually try to be fairly consistent with my output. These are, of course, unusual times we’re living through.

But I haven’t been dormant during my long absence.

I’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. 

And I’m now in a position to come forth singing my song.

What have I been doing?

Taking a bit of a break from social media and mailing gave me some time to think a lot about my vision for this project going forward. In the last year or so it has become very clear that a big part of what makes this project work is the resonance between imagery and story-telling. So I did a lot of work over the last months to make my branding and creative output more consistent with this new(ish) focus.

The first thing I did was to entirely redesign my website. The emphasis is now on a browsing experience that interleaves images and narrative — this is going to be the focus of this project going forward. My online store is now fully integrated with the website; it looks way better and the shopping experience is now seamless. And I have new prints in there too! Finally! And lots more coming in the next few months!

My second task was to finally complete my magazine project Baudelaire’s A Carcass. I’ve been promising to finish this up for an embarrassingly long time and I’m very happy to say that it’s now done! I spent a long time trying to get things right in terms of layout, arrangement, typography, etc. I wanted to invest some effort into figuring that stuff out because magazines and books really are the medium most suited to my newfound emphasis on the interplay between images and stories. So that magazine will be coming out before the end of Sept.

In fact…

I didn’t just finish one magazine project — I finished 3 of them.

The other two magazine projects will be called Bruxism and Strange Flowers. The former is a prose poem inspired loosely by my own experiences being trapped in a toxic relationship many years ago. The latter is a collection of original fiction that will be paired with macabre floral arrangements.

But wait! There’s more!

I’m also about halfway through a short book project that will be called Disassembly of the Pig. I’ll have lots more to say about this going forward; it will contain about 50-60 new images and some text.

Over the next weeks and months I’m going to be starting to release the results of my covid creating. I’ll be resuming my activity on social media and resuming my mailings. (But I’ll probably send emails at a reduced rate — maybe once a month or every other week. In retrospect the weekly schedule I used to maintain was way too much; mailing was distracting from my ability to create new work.)

I also have a thank-you gift coming soon, to express my gratitude for all of you who've supported me.

Stay tuned!