Nyarlathotep

It rained all night in my corner of the Sonoran Desert and the road to civilization is too flooded for me to go to massage therapy school today. The desert turns into a swamp. The toads are singing. Dragonflies hunt smaller insects in the air.

These sculptures are based on an illustration of Nyarlathotep from S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters. In Lovecraft's stories, Nyarlathotep serves as an intermediary between the Outer Gods and lesser beings. This particular avatar of Nyarlathotep is called The Howler in Darkness. The Field Guide is meant to be used in a Cthulhu-themed RPG.

The sculpture on the right has the head of a Burgess Shale organism called Sanctacaris, or "Santa Claws."

Chiqui checks out the unspeakable alien gods emerging from the muck.

Cthulhu Figures

Cthulhu is the evil alien sex god from H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu." These are some small, crude clay Cthulhus, a crude piano that used to belong to Tucson Unified School District, and sheet music to "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins.

This is a large, winged Cthulhu perched on my ribcage.

The are my two crudest and earliest Cthulhu statues. Also starring my nipples.

This is a more recent Cthulhu idol with two Tubolaras from Parallel Botany on top of my microwave. None of my body parts is included. It's completely safe for work.

Megasquid

These two sculptures are inspired by The Future is Wild by Dougal Dixon and John Adams. It's an illustration of what life on Earth might be like 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million years in the future. Humankind is doomed to extinction of course. 200 million years from now, all but a few bizarrely specialized vertebrates are extinct and squid-like creatures have colonized the land. There are intelligent, primate-like creatures called squibbons. There are also lumbering, elephant-like creatures called megasquid.

This is the first megasquid I made. Its mantle was placed incorrectly when it was fired, so I banished it to the arroyos behind my house. My neighbor tried to steal it, so I put it in hole in the ground closer to the house. It's slowly being filled with what passes for soil around here. I want archeologists to dig these things up and speculate about a Cthulhu cult in the Sonoran Desert.

Giralunas

The Giraluna is an imaginary plant-like entity from Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany. Leo Leonni is best known for psychedelic children's books with whimsical animal characters portrayed in cartoonish water colors on a background of organic prints. He also wrote a psychedelic fake botany book about anomalous undead plant-like creatures.

"This elusive and capricious plant is the Dream Queen of parallel botany."

"In its natural environment it can be preceived only as a nebulous interplay of glimmerings and empty spaces which alternate in the darkness and vaguely suggest where its outlines might be."

"But what could possibly be the function of abstract seeds, quite clearly incapable of generating new plants?"

Group of Giralunas in my kitchen

Giant Giraluna at Dinnerware Arts

Giant Giraluna at home in the desert