About

I started with macramé knotting around 1978-1979 – that was the first creative thing I did. I found a cross-stitch pattern of a mosaic in Ravena, three-dimensional, with seven colours. It took me a year, then I left it alone for some more years, because I was fed up with it – until, out of the blue, I picked it up, spent seven days doing nothing else than knotting, and finished it.

In the meantime, I started doing belt weaving. My father made me a loom, which I still have. Later I started sewing my own clothes. One of my work colleagues wanted to go to a course making lampshades; we did it and enjoyed ourselves. This encouraged me to do some more courses, one of which was making vintage-looking teddy bears. Two of my friends, owners of a bistro, asked me whether I’d be willing to sell a few of them. After a while I had to double the price, because I couldn’t make them quickly enough! I’ve made somewhere between 50-80 of them in the 1980s.

At this point, I was already busy making chainmail as well. I had made two vests, one of which I wore to a bar, and the owner asked me whether he could buy it. That was, of course, before the Internet – when I heard of someone who knew how to make chainmail, I sent him a letter. He replied, including diagrams! That was how I became “the man with rings,” because most people didn’t know what “chainmail” was.

A €250 vest takes me about 40-50 hours to make. Even not including the materials, that’s €5 per hour. Most people feel €250 is too expensive. You can’t buy works like mine in bulk, though. When I first joined the gay leather community, I felt a lot of the people had a bit of a clone look, wearing the same stuff. I wanted to be special. This feeling never went away.

I never had a “main” medium. I have worked, or still do, with papier mache, textile, resin, leather, metal, rubber, plaster… The latter brought me some notoriety when I created my most “famous” work, 100. Plaster casts of 100 erect penises, inspired by The Great Wall of Vagina by Jamie McCartney, made into a mosaic. (You can take a look here.)

This was my first solo exhibition. The work was five meters long; the gallery gave me a ten-meter wall I could paint with my favourite shade of blue, then do whatever I wanted with. It took me all day to get all the twenty-five boards lined out and hung. That was the first time I believed I had created a piece of art. I still get goosebumps thinking about that. Just seeing it hanging there… A very different feeling from having them piled up in a room. And, of course, I became The Man With the Cocks.

What’s next? I’ve spent the last few years focused mostly on embroidery and bodycasting. Recently I returned to chainmail. Putting things together… If you were to ask me again tomorrow, the answer might be different.