A still from Hanging By A Thread
analogue for the human body itself. Emphasizing the small and unassuming things in our normal lives, rather than the technological advances which have come to dominate our lives, I started to create the 78 "Clothespin Tarot" drawings, each of which centers on a specifically-made clothespin figure and an environment with manifestations of the original Tarot card implications.
We have found that the two-headed anthropomorphic clothespins of your trilogy have an unattended great ironic potential. You created these figures in a series of drawings more than ten years ago. Could you tell us something about the birth, and obviously the evolution of these characters? I have always felt the urge to produce work that reclaims the use of once-feminized materials, like thread, fabric, and clothespins. Before I invented the "Clothespin Freaks", I was working on projects in which clothespins transcend their original function by relating to the human body. Some of these projects were circular figurative drawings of bare male and female models with actual wooden clothespins attached to their bodies ("Clothespin Mandala") and circular acrylic paintings of a woman affixing clothespins to her body ("Clothespins Are a Girl's Best Friend"). These projects dealt with the phenomenon of human body modifications and raised questions of identity and sexuality.
Witnessing the "Clothespin Freaks" slowly coming to life through their first adventure in these Tarot drawings, I realized that these small, freakishly funny-looking "Clothespin Freaks", made of clear clothespins, sewn body parts and dolls' body parts, had many more adventures ahead of them. In fact, I felt that being at the center of a new mythology would give them the potential to comment on our angst-ridden times in a serio-comic way. I was eager to find out how the "Clothespin Freak" would evolve and transform in a different media. How would its appearance and evolution in a particular medium influence the previous and/or the next one? Based on the drawings, I produced a limited edition, 87-page
The pivotal moment causing me to create the actual "Clothespin Freak" character was when I started to look at the small clothespin as an
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