Many times people ask me where the interest in voodoo came from. It was born from a period much like the one I’m in now. My creative mind was stale — I had no thoughts, no originality, no will to produce or create anything. For 4 or 5 weeks I had done nothing, which was a long time for one semester at college. I had produced no work, shown nothing in class. I was barrelling toward crits with nothing to show.
And, as much as I hate to admit it, and try not to be this way, I’m a hater. No, that’s not street slang for anything. I just let hatred build up inside of me. I’ve done it recently with my job, and I need to do something to purge the hatred from my body. This is how the original voodoo series was born in 1999.
I decided making voodoo dolls of people I didn’t like would be fun. I always had a knack for creating stories of the perfect death or ultimate punishment for those people — creative stories. Nothing simple, like, “I wish they would die.” No, these stories went far beyond.
So I set about collecting what I would need. Barbie dolls, sculpty, paint, props. I decided to create diptychs and triptychs showing what happened to the doll, and what happened to the person as a result. I figured I would get grilled in crits on voodoo, and there would be some know-it-all there who would shred my series to pieces, so I set my sights on the library to get all of the answers I would need.
The library didn’t have what I needed. Turns out voodoo doesn’t have much to do with cursing people — it was an actual religion/way of life, and it was about the same thing all “religions” are about — the golden rule. Do unto others…
This was all well and good; it actually piqued my curiosity and made me want to learn more about voodoo, which is how the voodoo series you see today on my site came to be. But, it really didn’t help my present situation.
Long story short, there was no voodoo know-it-all in crits. Ironically, this series was one of the most well-received I produced in my time at KCAI. The most controversial piece in the entire series was a picture of me, the curser, having my spells turned back on me: I was in a YoYo Courtney box (which is one of Skipper’s friends from the Barbie empire). It sparked a fierce debate that ended with one of the professors leaving the room in tears.
More to come soon on the original voodoo doll series. Pictures, stories, FUN!
