Bunny Slippers and Torture

The creative process is strange. If you're doing it right, you never quite know where you're going to end up; every step on the path to completion is exciting. That's why I love making my Phergles. They start as one thing, and become another. They entertain me.

Quite where these pieces start I don't always recall. Inspiration, for lack of a better and less pretentious word, can be found anywhere: a figure glimpsed from a car window, a picture in the newspaper; a weird-looking guest on a TV show; the shape of a bottle; a doodle; a stain on the floor.

When I'm in Phergle mode, the whole world becomes a huge Rorschach blot. Is it a bat? A butterfly? People fighting? Sex?

Usually, I'm not even consciously aware of where these inspirations originate, and it's often only when the piece is finished that I realise where a particular aspect or image was sourced. Sometimes other people will point out some feature and say “It reminds me of ...” and then I'll see it too.

My newest piece, and probably my favourite in this collection, is “The Chair”, for it is complex and puzzling, even to me.

Everyone has a different opinion what it's about, and it would seem that for many the hood is the defining characteristic. "What does it mean", they ask.

                           All of this.
                              Or none of this?

And only when it was complete did I see echoes of other things, of which I had not been consciously aware when making it.

What a strange machine is the mind.
                 And what's with the bunny slippers?