When do you work best?

I stay up very late reading and then I wake up at noon from a wreck of benthic chthonic vatic kairotic dreams and go to my desk before speaking or eating where I write 500 words no matter how long it takes. It’s this entire duration — the hours of nocturnal reading, the sleep massacred by many succubi, the hypnapompic writing — where the work happens. If I can get more than 500 words on a given day, I feel godlike and also like I am merely the humble servant to a craft, and this craft is the hardest in the world, and it’s hardest of all for writers. Fun!

How has your practice changed over time?

I used to be devoted to small, fleeting gestures, liminal spaces, absences, and impermanence. Now, I’m in my vast era. I require space. 

What fuels you?

Rage.

What material do you work with and why?

I’ve got a thing for the void. Which has materialized in the last decade as an attraction to materials that tell time, like, are kind of clocks in and of themselves. In my art, I make sculpture and paintings out of silk, honey, human hair, mold, taxidermied wings, goo that drips and drains over months and can’t be cleaned up. I like working with gravity, deterioration, materiality that’s destroyed over time, ruins; I try to make the abyss feel visceral and intimate and close for my viewer. It’s a very engaging conundrum to translate this obsession with the void to writing, where the material is words, which are very mundane, banal, and everyday, used by everyone to do the most ephemeral stuff, but, when shaped by the craft of writing, become permanent in a way that can outlast our own bodies. The trick for a writer is to make words feel sorcerous, newly alive, transformed. This is a similar task as when I make a sculpture with a material like honey or hair, which are also everyday things that I’m trying to put through an almost thaumaturgical process — but as I write this right now, it strikes me that this is the task of any artist: to take material into themselves and do that unspeakable magic to shift its shape.

How do you get unstuck?

This might be annoying, but I don’t get stuck. I have a promiscuous and profligate relationship to genre and form, which means I have many different pieces, projects, ideas, and works cooking at any given time. They orbit and constellate each other, and bring me into different worlds and universes, so if one needs to be left alone for a moment to spin on its own axis, I can just hop to another star in the cluster.

Where do you find inspiration?

I have an erotic relationship to meaning itself, and I like to describe my methodology as being one of hermeneutical mischief. What that means is that I love when meaning changes, when it tricks me. I think that’s the point of meaning — that it can change. Finding meaning, being seduced by it almost like a siren, feeling it consolidate and articulate itself, and then watching it metamorphose into something else, that is it for me. 

Who has influenced you and your work?

I’m most seduced by those who’ve been called freaks, who smile when no one’s watching, who have a lot of gender in their mouths, who think long and hard about clothes, flowers, cooking, and movies, and who, if there’s a choice to be made between working alone in the studio and dinner with loved ones, will always choose the latter.

Who do you hope to influence?

Hags, crips, queers, punks, perverts, weirdos, whores, and witches.

Why are you an artist?

A paradox: I’m wildly, patiently stubborn in my vision, but also gnostically devout in my conviction that “I” don’t exist, or if I do, not for long.

What advice would you give other artists?

Read a lot.

What question would you like to ask other artists?

Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means.