1 - Can you to present your personality ?
Err, what can I say ? My names MID and I happily waste my days driven by an obsession to make images. I've been involved in the whole punk scene since I first got into it in 1979 and have been playing in bands (Deviated Instinct, Spine Wrench, Bait) and doing artwork for bands since about 1984. Last year I decided to make a real, full time go at it as it was just taking up more and more of my time so I set up 'Bonehive Designs'. At the moment I'm drowning in total debt and going very gradually insane…..but I'm having fun on the way.
2 - What are your motivation to choose a band for realised a cover ?
To be honest I don't really choose the bands, they choose me. Bands come to me having seen my work on other covers or come across my website, or sometimes it's just because they're friends. Of course there would be certain situations when I would have to turn a band down, I.e. if they had bigoted views or politics, but thankfully that's never happened. I think most people understand where I'm coming from, although occasionally people might misinterpret some of the imagery in my work, but generally I find that I see eye to eye with the people I'm lucky enough to work with.
3 - What do you think expressed into your work ?
I don't like to think about it too deeply, I don't think it'd be very healthy. I take a lot of outside influences into my brain and then it all comes out as some kind of reflection of how I might be thinking/feeling at the time. I don't think there's anything too literal in my personal work. I like to leave it very much open to interpretation, people can make of it what they will. For me I hope I provide something that is full of passion and beauty in it's many faced forms.
4 - Your work is gloom, dark, gothic. Do you think to be a dark person ?
I can understand what you're saying, but to be honest I don't feel too comfortable for it always to simply be categorised as dark or gloomy. There's a whole sub-genre going about these days under the stifling umbrella term of ''Dark-Art", I don't really want to be tied down to that. I'm certainly drawn to a lot of imagery that is perhaps very negatively perceived, and I do take a lot of inspiration from the darker underbelly of society, but I certainly hope there are positive elements to my work. I don't want it to be simply about pure misery, that's certainly not how I see myself. Of course I have my dark moments and moods, don't we all. And the last few years have been particularly difficult as I've been battling with depression and that's certainly had a bearing on the imagery in some of my work. But at the moment I'm busy working on a whole series of works that are based on some photographs I've taken of flowers, and not a skull in sight, ha ha.
5 - Your site internet is really great. What do you think of internet.
I totally embrace the internet, I'd be a fool not to. It's certainly revolutionised the way I work and how artists promote their work. It's a scary thing though for I find it hard to imagine a world without my computer now…I spend so many hours sat in front of this machine. I think it's important to keep things in perspective, it's easy to find yourself obsessively immersed, it's definitely a form of escapism as much as a communication tool and resource. There is the danger of breeding a whole generation of socially retarded web geeks. Just don't forget there is still a REAL world out there. Ha.
6 - Do you think for example the Cybersex is the future of love ?
Well carrying on from the previous question, like I said it definitely has it's place and there are new exciting avenues to be explored. Love can take many forms, cybersex gives you the freedom to totally restructure and reinvent yourself, and why not, but the future of mankind is in the physical world. I think there will come a time when there is some kind of backlash and we will have to relearn how to deal and interact with ourselves as people in the flesh.
7 - What your opinion about the body modification ? Are you into piercing,
tattoos, body performance... You have a lot cover with body...As an aesthetic tool, I love the body, it's insides and out, it's structure, muscle, skin and bone and I use that as a focus to a lot of my artwork. I have an interest in body modification and how some people utilise that. I'm far more interested in the ritual, spiritual and performance side, as opposed to pure fashion. I've always been fascinated in the work of individuals such as Ron Athey, Franko B And Fakir Musafer. Personally I have a few piercings and tattoos, nothing very extreme. I pretty much had everything done within a 12 month period 16 years ago and I've been meaning to add to those ever since, but the time's never been right, there's no hurry, I don't expect my body to be going anywhere in the near future.
8 - Tell us about your work with photo.... ?
To be honest as much as I love working with photography I haven't done much in the last couple of years. Before I got my computer I did all my image manipulation in the darkroom but unfortunately since I've had Photoshop I've become a bit lazy. But one of the main reasons I haven't done much is the lack of facilities, when I was at Art School they had some incredible darkrooms which I used to just disappear into for days on end but when I left I was kinda stuck. We've just kitted out a new darkroom down at the Warehouse Artists studios (where my art studio is) so hopefully I'll be getting right back into it soon. It's so much more fun than sitting in front of computer and I just like to forget all the rules and experiment, it's a very unpredictable medium so you discover the most wonderful things by happy accident.
9 - I think you have a new musical project. Some word about it ?
Well, for the past few years I've been working on and off in BAIT, s studio based project featuring myself and Snapa (also ex- Deviated Instinct), we haven't done much together for a while but we plan on doing some new stuff really soon as we have a couple of 7"s planned for later in the year, these are just very limited things coming out on a couple of U.S labels. It's very, heavy, twisted, metalcore kinda stuff.
I did recently have another more punk orientated band going but it seems to have ground to a halt even before it really got going due to lack of commitment from various people, oh well.10 - Your project. Do you think exposed your art in the future ?
I'm still mainly concentrating on my own work and am continuously exhibiting in various spaces, at the moment that's mostly just local Galleries but I really want to get my work out to a wider audience and would love to exhibit more nationally and internationally, but it's quite a hard world to break into. For the time being though you can keep up to date with my various projects by checking out my website.
http://home.freeuk.net/bonehive
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