Provenance

Kim Parkhurst

[Content warning: Much of this interview is about the 1950’s era serial killer Ed Gein. When Kim Parkhurst initially submitted her response, she included the following the following write up:

“When I saw this lamp, my imagination took on its Rod Serling voice and said, ‘Here we see an extraordinary sculpture of unknown origin. What manner of muse inspired it? What hands could have made it? Let's conjure a possible history for this lamp; a history that begins in a dark, squalid farmhouse, where a lonely madman creates his charnel masterpieces from the unimaginable and unspeakable. The road sign says 'Plainfield, Wisconsin,' but this artist's workspace is undoubtedly located in the Twilight Zone.’ If I've learned one thing, it's that you don't argue with the Rod Serling Voice.”]

Interview by L. Valena

Can you tell me what you responded to?

It was a lamp, and it had mask faces with wire coming out of it.

What was your first reaction?

I saw it, and my first thought-  I tend towards the morbid I suppose- was what would be the origin of an artifact like this? And sometimes the low-hanging fruit is the sweetest. It would be great if my ideal audience could be not the dumb kid sitting next to me who I want to make laugh, but that's basically it.

Back up a little bit. So you thought to yourself "where did this come from?"

Yeah. It's kind of like when you go to a rummage sale, and you see things. At a church sale or flea market, sometimes you see things and think, "what could have spawned this? Where could this possibly have come from? And that's what I was thinking- where could this have come from? Obviously, the Twilight Zone. I wanted to know more about it. Don't read judgement [on my part] into this.

Oh not at all! Tell me more about when you started going down this path, and how you got where you got.

Well, it's kind of a dichotomy, because half of the time, I'm like Beatrix Potter- Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddleduck, and all of that. And half the time, I'm Charles Addams and Basil Gogos, and all this spooky monster scary stuff. And true crime detective, lurid, awful. And it really is kind of half and half, and both of it is really authentic, but for that one it really could go only one way. So, where could it have come from? Obviously, it came Ed Gein's house. I mean, he was all about the arts and crafts, right? I found this picture of him where he had this expression on his face that said "I'm working on a project"- he damn near had his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth.

Tell me more about Ed Gein.

He was the inspiration for Norman Bates. A pretty isolated family- his mom was really overbearing, religious and domineering, kind of isolated him and his brother. His brother died, and that's another story. But, it was just Ed and his mom, and when she passed away he kind of lost it. Because then he didn't really have anybody. They didn't really diagnose anybody then until they really started causing trouble, but he was kind of a simple guy around town, and people would have him watch the kids and repair stuff, and whatnot. He ended up killing a couple ladies, and they were matronly middle-aged ladies, much like his mom had been. One of them had run the hardware store. The police saw that his receipt was the last one there, and so they went out to his farmhouse to see if he knew anything about it. They found all this stuff in his house, including that lady, trussed up like a deer. And he'd been up to all kinds of stuff. He had skulls that he had turned into bowls. He had a chair that he had reupholstered with human skin.

[Indecipherable aghast/disgusted sound] Ugh.

Right! And he killed this lady and another lady, but for years he'd been digging up graves. This was I think 1957- when this all went down. It's the whole thing about a small town getting a whole bunch of bad attention. And it was lurid and terrible. He was the inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho, and very much the inspiration for Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs because he had been working on a lady suit.

[More indecipherable groaning noises]

Yeah! Right.

Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are both such fucking incredible movies.

Well that's just it- it's really had the heart of so much of the pop culture/modern monsters. All these stories with the overwhelming mother who he's so dependent on, and then she's gone, and then he just goes bananas and terrible things happen. It was very weird, because he wanted to embody her somehow, that was the only way he could get her back, but he was making this woman suit, and it was tied up with this repressed sexuality. And was it sexuality, was it gender, was it the alternate personality thing or the only way to channel her? It was a mess.

But it was fascinating, and especially at that time when everybody was getting into psychoanalysis and picking apart how the mind works. It really stuck- it was influential in so many ways, all kinds of movies and things. Shoot, even Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They put him in an institution, and he pretty much stayed institutionalized- years and years later I think he did go to trial. But it was the quintessential weird thing happening in a remote farm house. It was a mess- just absolute squalor. I sent a link to some of the photos [find them here- no gore].

He'd just been eating cans of beans. What was he doing up there where nobody could see? What happens behind other peoples walls? It's a big maelstrom of fascination. I have these things on when I'm painting- it helps me keep my butt in the chair if I'm listening to a story. True crime works really well. So I have all this information stacked up- I learn all these things, just putting on cold case files, and podcasts now. It kind of gets stuck in my head, and then someone makes mention of a town, and I'm like "Oh yeah, wasn't so and so from there who killed eleven people?" You have to kind of add yourself a filter, because you don't want to be that person. Maybe bring up the big tourist attraction that's there instead.

"Isn't that where the world's largest spool of thread is?"

Right! I grew up outside Niagara Falls, so it should be easy.

Hey, we can't help the things that fascinate us.

Listen, I work from home. I'm up in my garret, getting weird, listening to odd stories. But it's not like hero worship or anything like that- it's monsters out of fairy tales or scary movies or something, except it's in real life. And you're wondering where's the line between normal and not normal? Can you see it? How far away can you see it coming?

Right- all that weird grey area. How is it that some people can so easily cross a line and not even know it was there? Even when everyone else sees the line?

But they didn't though! And that's the thing- some people say that those people were foolish and trusting, and they should have been more savvy. I'm not that arrogant. That's one of the traits, isn't it? People have charisma, and can make you lower your defenses and everything- so there's that aspect to it. Just about everyone I know- certainly every woman I know, has a creep story, if not worse. I remember being about twenty, where we'd really come out with "here's this horrible thing that happened to me." And at first they were all 'bullet dodged' kind of stories, but as we got older, it became more talking about actual experiences we had that we weren't really comfortable with. Just the ubiquity of that- of that experience. So I think there's a big element of 'there but for the grace of god.' We control what we can.

Seeing these monsters helps us to kind of personalize the horror a little bit, and maybe makes it a little bit more manageable, and less mysterious. Even though the horror itself is totally unintelligible, it's still something we can look at and examine.

A lot of people don't like the unresolved cases, because there's no justice in it. Not that there ever can be, because you can't balance the scale really, but at least there's a sense that the guy was caught. There was accountability. In a world that feels like there's a lot of unfairness, and where bad wins a lot of the time, there's some comfort to be taken when you can have a satisfactory good-guys-got-the-guy kind of ending. But a lot of it is like, what is the one point on the decision tree where there was no turning back? Or where he was irreparably damaged so that he would do what he did? The psychology of it is fascinating. And it's far enough removed- I like a little bit of distance of history, because then you get a bit of the mindset of another time.

Have you ever read The Devil in the White City?

I did! And you know what- it's so embarrassing, but all through it I just kept thinking "can we get past all this Ferris wheel stuff?" I mean, it's just so shameful.

In your concept for this, this was an object that was made by Ed Gein in his house and somehow ended up in a rummage sale or something.

This was the dumb idea that gets in the way, that you're going to have to do, because as long as it's in your head, nothing better is going to come through. I'd love to impress the teacher, but nope. I have to impress goofy kid who sits next to me.

Is that what you feel like this is? That instead of you're impressing the teacher, you're impressing your goof-off next to you?

Yeah. I'm saying you have to know your audience, but sometimes your audience is inevitable. I love that. I read Stephen King, you know, become of course I do. A lot of his reflections on being in college and creative writing, and his teachers wanted him to create art with like symbolism and stuff. And he's like, I just want to write a good, scary story. And they just about threw him out on his ear with disgust. I mean, I would love if some brilliant thing had happened here, by design, but I don't think it works that way.

Totally. I think that's a great thing about this project. Brilliance certainly happens, but we really want quick and dirty. We want people jump in the pool and then like, get out of the pool.

If you don't have boundaries, how can you have genius? You can't have a punchline without a setup.

And we're also are really into this idea that creativity can be a shared genius. The thing that's really weird about being an artist is that we are all in our own separate studios and doing our thing in our own little boats, and it's nice to make contact with each other.

This was fun opportunity and I really dig it.

Do you have any advice for someone else embarking on this project?

Jump in. Don't, don't worry about impressing anyone cause that, that just gets in your way. If you're making your work to fit, you're doing it backwards. Make your work, and put it out there like it's a lighthouse for weirdos. Then your people will find you.

Call Number: M18VA | M22.paPro

Based in the wooded northern hills of central Massachusetts not far
from H.P. Lovecraft's imaginary town of Dunwich, illustrator Kim
Parkhurst combines the familiar with the strange to conjure the cozy but
eerie feeling of scary stories and regional legends. Surrounded by
forgotten forest cellar holes and overgrown slate-stoned cemeteries, she
keeps the fantastic and phantasmagoric close to her heart (in a shoebox
under the floorboards.)

[Editor’s Note: This is the end of this particular branch of the Magenta tree/stream. You can read more about our pruning initiative here. If this artwork/interview inspired some creative movement in you, and you would like to create a response to re-seed this branch, we would be psyched to have you! Just push the button below to get started.]