Mother! Oh God! Blood! (A Psycho Diorama)
Cosclay for Mother’s head sculpt
Were I in Norman Bates’ loafers, on the night he had to tidy up after his Mother did that awful, terrible thing to Marion Crane in Cabin Number One, I wonder if my natural aversion to germs and blood and gore would be overridden by my weird, anxiety-calming obsession with cleaning and organizing.
She’s still waiting for her tongue here…so she can speak.
I guess we’ll never know. Because on top of both of those innate urges, I also possess an overriding, much more powerful aversion to working in the hospitality industry. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course. But the people who do it generally need to be highly skilled in human interaction and patient as saints. Two traits I lack.
The figure gets a primer coating of light grey with an airbrush.
I suppose, though, that if I were running the old Bates Motel, I wouldn’t see too many people. Maybe on those long, lazy afternoons where the only sound I hear is the dry, desert wind blowing over the dusty parking lot, I could work on my art. Norman stuffed birds. I’d probably draw or sculpt something like this Mother art doll I made for our Psycho diorama.
Mother’s looking healthy with her fiber-fill longjohns.
But Mother is no bird. She’s an elegant, beautiful woman that just happens to jet back and forth between her sunken, mildewed bed and the cold, dark fruit cellar in the belly of her estate. So I tried to account for that with the bloated (but lovely), rotting (but refined) face I sculpted.
Body reshaped with a classy, black wrap.
I could genuinely imagine myself sitting behind that front desk at the Bates Motel, wrapping this mother figure’s armature with fiber fill, then enclosing all of that fluff with a tight, foam wrap. It’s probably not too dissimilar to what Norman did with those birds of his. Very relaxing. Something you can do while you let your mind wander and….think thoughts you might never speak aloud.
No stitches necessary when you use fabric glue.
I guess, in that respect, with not a single customer coming in, or car driving by, maybe the hospitality industry would be a good fit for me. I could spend my days just thinking. And making things, of course. Like Mother’s beautiful dress. She always looks lovely when she dresses up.
Fabric with a quilted feel is used for the knitted shawl.
Of course, even in the heat of summer, the fruit cellar can get a bit damp. I wouldn’t want her to catch a chill in her bones. So I made a cozy shawl to keep her warm. I know it’s not elaborate, but she seems to like it. She praised my work, in fact. Which is a nice change of pace from the frequent peck peck pecking away at my self esteem. The constant reminder that all I do all day is sit here, alone, making things, and daydreaming. Well. I’ll show her. I’ll show you all.
“I’ll just sit here and be quiet…”
And here’s how I’ll do it. By providing a link to the video where Michelle and I build the Psycho Fruit Cellar diorama. It was a ton of fun and an insane amount of work. But everybody goes a little mad sometimes.