CURA.

I just wanna thank my mum and dad.

My mum was a doctor. She scanned medical magazines every morning while eating her Fruit’n Fibre. The house was full of extreme medical imagery—burns, tumors, wounds, rotten teeth. Cronenberg on the kitchen table. None of it seemed especially gross to me: there was something strange and amazing about seeing what you might turn into, offered to you in this neutral way. While she was watching Twin Peaks and finding out who killed Laura Palmer, I was roosting in her belly, an unborn oddball. She had a big gnarly hemorrhage, it really hurt, I was born early. Meanwhile, my dad sold pearls. They were just in the house, too, they used to lie on these plush velvet scrolls that looked like huge cat’s tongues. I think the combination of weird medical stuff and jewelry did something to my brain: transformation as a treat, bewitched bodies, the grotesque and the gorgeous mating.

I remember David Lynch saying that he dissected the carcass of a cat once and the internal organs would be so beautiful if you didn’t know what they were, like pieces of stained glass.

Uh huh.

And I remember watching Twin Peaks on Xmas Day when I was eleven years old and getting this spooky feeling amid the dark synths and the Red Room and lonesome swaying fir trees. I was home.

When I was growing up and feeling weird about my body and trying to dissociate for it, I was, yup, madly attracted to monsters. Weird mirrors for my woozy self. I always thought they were beautiful. Real beauty is not about having the body of a bronze unicorn. Real beauty is something shocking and magical that scares and confuses you even while you’re falling in love. Oh, I didn’t know you could do that. It probably helped that it was the ’90s, too, a decade where the monster was frequently rendered as somebody enchanted and heroic: Matthew Barney, McQueen, Buffy, Tim Burton. Lightning through my bloodstream. Edward Scissorhands made my heart ache. I really fancied Cruella de Vil. I wanted to be the Beast from Beauty and the Beast stalking around his magnificent haunted castle. They had weird bodies, too, or they were freaks at war with a boring external world—I lived in suburbia, it sucked—but they weren’t weeping about it. They were running wild and making beautiful things. It all looked way more fun than being ‘normal’. (Nobody understands this heroic monstrousness more than John Waters: they’re the stars in all his movies, gleefully twisted.) The future all laid out.

So I tried to pick stuff for this spread that illustrated this warped aesthetic ideal, all stuff I love, which is a kind of cryptic autobiography.

The pictures of Alice and the White Rabbit getting high in the park are from a shoot I directed with Aidan Zamiri. Thanks, Iris and Maggie. Veronica the beautiful werewolf—the prosthetics are by my old pal, frequent collaborator and American genius Emily Schubert who also made the dog mask I’m wearing on the cover… The movie Wolf with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t suck in the way people claim, the taxidermy tree is by the artist Mark Dion and the zombie drooling blood whilst hawking tampons is Ms. Alex Bag in her video Coven Services. People were furious about the catlike spine on that odalisque by Ingres, they said it was a perversion of nature, but don’t you think she’s dreamy?

Sadly I couldn’t find a hi-res version of any of the pix of myself dressed as Dracula as a little kid. I used to be him all weekend, fanged, sweet blood around my mouth. They were like the first artworks I ever made. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.