In my first high school photography class I photographed my TV when Depeche Mode’s 1987 Strange Love video was first released. The lyrics and visuals were spell binding. Seeing those first images appear in the negatives had me hooked.
It really all started during my undergraduate and graduate school years. I was interested in photography, metal smithing and bookmaking, and it was through these mediums that I started to explore kink, body modification, and eroticism.
I got my nose pierced with a piercing gun in 1990 during my freshman year in college at a small alternative book store ( yes, I know). They had a copy of Re/Search’s Modern Primitives and after flipping through it, I immediately bought it. I was fascinated by the profiles of Fakir Musafar, and Vaughn from Body Manipulations.
As I continued my education my professors inspired me to photograph what I loved and found passion in. I thought back to that first image I took of the music video and started there. I was using medium and large format cameras which lent themselves to a long thought-out process. They all became a way for me to explore eroticism. The precision of crafting the structure of a book inspired me to make my own leather restraints and furniture to use in my photography and personal life. It was the ritual in the process of making the photograph, the book or box that fascinated me.
A year later, in 1991, I had acquiring all the PFIQ magazines from Gauntlet and started piercing my friends. In 1992, I discovered Fakir’s Body Play magazine at a local alternative bookstore. It advertised Fakir’s piercing school, and I immediately contacted him and was enrolled in the second class he offered. There were four of us in the class and it was held in his living room. It was there in Menlo Park where I met my mentors Fakir, Erik Dakota, and Allen Falkner. Shortly after returning from the course, I opened a body piercing and branding studio in the back of Amused Clothing in Bloomington Indiana. It was the first piercing/branding studio in the state.
When I met Fakir Musafar and his partner Cleo Dubois they together opened my eyes to all the forms kink and ritual could take.
After piercing for a couple of years in Bloomington I started traveling, teaching at the Fakir body piercing school, and moved to Atlanta Georgia to start piercing at Urban Tribe. The pull of the west coast was strong, and in 1994 a couple of friends and I started a piercing and branding studio in San Jose California called Voodoo Therapy. A highlight of that era was hosting one of the first APP gathering that was opened to non-Gauntlet piercers. It was at that meeting that Ken Coyote and I wrote what would years later become the standard practice for equipment sterilization and piercing aftercare for the industry.
I was still travelling back to Indiana and piercing out of a friend’s house for a week every couple of months to cover my expenses in California. The constant travel was not what I wanted, so I took the summer to travel and guest spot at Obscurities in Dallas, then landed back in Bloomington to finish up my BFA degree in Photography. I pierced my way through the last few years of my undergraduate degree at Skinquake in Bloomington and briefly at Body Accents in Indianapolis.
In 1998 I graduated from IU and moved to Rochester New York to attend graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology. During the summers I would travel to California to guest pierce at Pierced Out and Body Manipulations.
After graduating from RIT in 2000, I moved to San Francisco, continuing to work at Body Manipulations and Pierced Out. Vaughn let me set up a small lathe in the basement of Body M and that was the start of my woodworking passion. I started making exotic wood plugs first for myself and then for studios. I fell in love with the process of crafting jewelry. I did it with the love of the ritual and magic that went into creating rare and unique pieces. At the time there was only one company, Spectrum Craft, making high-quality wood plugs. He didn’t make what I was looking for so that kicked off my research of woods.
In 2003 I moved the lathe to my home garage and started Esoteric Body, a wood jewelry company. It was around this time I met a wood guru, David Borek, in Texas. He taught me the fine points of turning and opened my world to species of wood that blew my mind. I pushed the idea of handcrafted, high quality, rare, and unique woods doing a lot of research on woods and their composition. In 2005, I co-authored a research paper with Erica Skadsen at Organic LLC on the dangers of toxic woods in the jewelry industry and we lectured at Association of Professional Piercers.
In 2011, I decided to retire from both the piercing industry and the jewelry industry to pursue a full-time faculty position at a local university. After teaching at the university for 13 years as a full time professor, I’m back to my roots of working with the unique woods I fell in love with as a jewelry maker.
I have been drawn to high quality craftsmanship for as long as I can remember. It was the precision and the ritual of the journey more than the finished project that I fell in love with. This has moved me to my current endeavor of making floggers, canes, stingers and (soon to be) paddles. As a craftsman I believe its my duty to not just merely make a product for commerce but to breathe new life into once living beings that have sometimes witnessed generations of our civilization. Each piece is imbued with the energy of the beings they are created from. There is a ritual that must take place to honor these beings that have lived among us. Wood and leather have a living history that needs to be celebrated, and I can think of no better way than to allow our bodies to be touched by these noble beings. The sensuality of the wood and leather combine to provide sensation to both the person wielding them and the person receiving the impact.
For me a well-crafted scene is like the reciprocal relationship and energy exchange between the artist and their craft, the piercer and the client, or the photographer and their work. These instruments of embodiment absorb energy from the creator, the handler and the recipient.