Why do you think tattooing has infiltrated the mainstream?
Tattooing didn’t infiltrate the mainstream — the mainstream absorbed it. In a way, it’s all about money.
Has it lost that taboo status?
Unfortunately, yes.
You like images of 1950s pin-up girls, skulls, snakes, and spiders. Is there a theme to your work?
I speak of ideas like sexuality or death or the implications that images like snakes carry in a Judeo-Christian culture. My primary theme could be something like primal urges. I like to play with stereotypes that are in people’s heads. If you add a bat, it makes everything seem sinister. Since I was a kid, I have been fascinated with things that are out of the ordinary. The monstrous, the grotesque, in certain forms, questions the perfection of the “supreme creator.”
Your work reminds me of the sideshow attractions that traveling carnivals used to have, where the idea was to disturb and entertain.
I don’t try to entertain with my work, or make it a circus. But I feel attracted by a form of nomadic life that existed in these sideshows. Humans are morbid.
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