December 2007, Elizabeth McGrath Interview

Beautiful Freaks

Recently, I chatted with LA-based spooky girl and all around cool lady Elizabeth McGrath. A true renaissance woman, McGrath has done time in weirdo punk band Tongue, before moving on to the girl-group meets rockabilly frankenstein that is Miss Derringer. In addition to music, McGrath also exhibits her unique sculptures and other artistic works in cities from Berlin to Barcelona. Her sculptures and paintings are two-parts hot-rodded horror and one-part kitsch, and often reveal an intense eye to detail that is as alarming as it is astounding. Her latest show, "The Incurable Disorder," is a collision of man-made status symbols and the natural world.

So, the name of the exhibit is "The Incurable Disorder," and the theme is man-made status symbols vs. the suffering of nature. How did you show this juxtaposition?

I was doing a lot of faux taxidermy and using a lot of upholstered fabric. We did a deer and then tattooed it and put power cables on its antlers -- you know, just mixing nature and man-made materials to form a creature of the future. Or, a creature of now.

One of the more interesting pieces is a sculpture called "Deerhouse."

That was one of the faux taxidermy pieces. It's a life-sized doe and I covered it with upholstery fabric and built a Victorian-style doll-house on the back of it. It opens in the back, and inside I put a bakery with little cakes, little taxidermy heads and a lot of fine china.


Elizabeth McGrath, Deerhouse, 2007 mixed media, courtesy Billy Shire Fine Arts
Los Angeles, CA

That's so intricate!

It took a long time! And the actual house comes off the deer's back and it has a velvet lined back carrier for it.


There's also a mounted rabbit-head called "Sikko".

Yeah, my husband Morgan Slade drew all of the tattoos on the rabbit -- it's called "Sickos unite."


Do you two collaborate a lot?

Yeah. He used to be a tattoo artist, and we're in Miss Derringer together, so.... We spend a lot of time together.


There's a definite old-school Americana style to the tattoo work -- is that his influence?

Yeah, he likes the old school tattoos. There's a couple pieces [that we collaborated on] -- there's another piece that's a deer head with a lot more tattoos on it.

You make a lot of mounted heads, it seems. How do you go about making the heads themselves?

Well, there's a lot of mounted heads in this show, and also lots of pieces that are in boxes. Some of the heads I make armatures (wire framework) for with plastic bags and coat-hangers. Then, I cover it with a resin two part epoxy. Some of them are foam taxidermy heads that have been cut in two and reshaped. I also cover those with the resin epoxy and then airbrush them and paint them with different mediums: glaze, shellac, roofing tar -- all kinds of things, depending on what kind of finish I'm looking for.

I like the Bears of Sorrow piece. It's pretty freak-show.

Yeah, the life-sized two-headed bear. Winter Rosebud, a designer at Trashy Lingerie, made the little hats.

A lot of these pieces, this one included, have a sort of carnival/freak-show element to them.

I'm really inspired by those Coney Island type machines that you put a dime into and then watch them move.

Between the carny aspect and the Sailor Jerry-esque tattoos, it's a weird, old America style. You also seem to be inspired by Edward Gorey and Victorian art.

There's one artist that I really love: Leonore Carrington. I think Edward Gorey was inspired by her. I really love Victorian art and pretty much all kinds of art.

Your subject matter tends to gravitate towards the macabre. What inspires you?

My dad worked for the LA county morgue when I was growing up. I was a really rebellious teenager, and I was always getting into situations where I had to do a lot of community service, and they sent me to complete that with my dad. I spent a lot of time there -- that could have something to do with it my fascination with the morbid, I guess.

What did you do there?

One of the jobs was just filing reports on how people died. I wasn't supposed to read the files, but of course I did. It was mostly pretty boring, but there were interesting things. After doing it for one summer, I started a tally on gang-related deaths vs. other weird deaths. Like, "they got shot, and they had spaghetti for dinner." Most of them were gang-related, but out of every 20 boxes of files, one box would have the interesting files. Weird stuff that happened: weird murders or body parts found or something, and half of those would be suicides. By doing this, I figured out that a lot of women committed suicide in their mid-to-late thirties or early forties. They all had cats and left suicide notes. Most of the men were in their late forties, and most of them did it in their garages, by hanging or shooting themselves.

So, this is fuel for the current works? Have you always created things?

I had always dabbled with creative things, I guess. My aunt had a restaurant and I made her menus -- she was also into macabre things. I didn't do much art in my teenage years. I was running around, playing in punk bands. I didn't do anything until I started this fanzine for kids in the neighborhood when I was 19 o r 20. A friend worked at Kinko's, and we decided we'd do a magazine and focus on bands we liked, because we felt we were getting ignored by the media. Then this animation director named Fred Stuhr hired me to work on some videos and animation after seeing some of my art. He did a lot of the early Tool videos.


Elizabeth McGrath, Titanic Buffalo, 2007 mixed media courtesy Billy Shire Fine Arts
Los Angeles, CA

So he took you under his wing?

Yeah, I worked for Fred Stuhr Animation Studios, and then another studio. I never really dreamt of doing anything in the artistic world until I started working on videos. That sparked all kinds of creative ideas for me. I couldn't stop. A lot of the time I was volunteering on other people's shoots or school projects. If they had even a minimal budget for me to work with -- to buy new materials -- I'd be so excited to be working on it.

Sounds like most of your experience was more practical than school-based...

I actually went to school for fashion design for a year and ended up working for Trashy Lingerie in LA. They'd be like: "I want a giant, surfing Santa," or "I wanna make real dolls." Just really bizarre requests. I was like, "oh, yeah... I can do that." I'd get materials and try to make things on their dime. I remember I started making fairy wings -- I have this pair of fairy wings on the cover of Rolling Stone. They didn't look that good. I think I had like five minutes to construct them, but from there, everyone and their mom who needed fairy wings was going to Trashy. It was just random things like that. I also made this toy called The Junior Meth Lab. It looked like a science kit, but it had crack pipes and stuff. It kind of sky-rocketed from there.

Is that where your "Toykiller" toy and accessory line came from?

Actually, it started because I was in this punk band called Tongue. We were really horrible, but we toured a lot. We had no money, so I would make dolls in the van and at shows I'd sell them for $15. I just started putting them online and for a while, that was how the band made it from point a to b. It was fun....

You've got the strangest thing I've ever seen on an artists' site: butcher knives.

Oh, yeah. I found them at this weird little Thai restaurant and I just bought all of their knives. They were like, "what are you doing with these?" I was like, "don't worry about it." [laughs]
I cut the handles off and painted them. I thought they'd be really cool Christmas ornaments, but they're really sharp. We did a limited edition book that came with a life-sized butcher knife that I screened designs on. When I was trying to get together all of the knives to sign, I think I got through twenty of them before my fingers were all cut up. The curator was like, "OK, this is enough -- we're getting blood everywhere."

[Laughing] Have you shown those in a gallery?

I used to. I used to do a lot of shows. Before I knew it, I'd commit to four group shows a week, and I was like, "oh, give them a knife." [laughs] Now, I just give them to my friends. I've been wanting to do big ones, but I figured someone would hurt themselves. This is America: we have to label coffee as being hot. [laughs] I don't want people to cut their fingers off or get tetanus.

Elizabeth McGrath's "The Incurable Disorder" exhibit runs until January 5th at The Billy Shire Fine Arts Gallery in Culver City, CA. For a glimpse online, visit billyshirefinearts.com or check out elizabethmcgrath.com for her portfolio.