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I have been making these for about eight years.
The name Fleshlette came, honestly, from a baguette.
The idea was that I wanted to make something that was small and fleshy,
but kind of said acute and indicated that it was diminutive.
I started making Fleshlettes because I was looking for
a way to make a style of sculpture that was uniquely my own and stood out.
The inspiration ultimately came aim from a story I heard,
handed down in my wife's family, which was that my sister in law
had a tumor growing inside one of her ovaries called a teratoma.
[SOUND] And a teratoma is essentially a group of stem cells just kind of
gone awry by dividing and multiplying on their own and
creating random human body parts at will, they will grow teeth, hair.
Sometimes you'll get little bits of bone or other matter.
Things that you would not normally find inside a tumor.
I was of course, intrigued and terrified by this idea and it really kind of left
an impact on me around the time when I was trying to find my own style.
And pair that with the fact that I really needed to find a way to practice making
realistic human skin and
I started making little balls of flesh that had body parts on them.
And they just sort of grew, and
grew, and grew until we've got these really big monsters today.
Here's the tallest and largest Fleshlette I've ever made and
she's named after my friend's girlfriend.
She's a combination of a large intestine, kidney,
a snake-shaped ball of flesh, a tongue and a clubbed foot.
The first Fleshlette I made was just a little ball of skin with a little bit of
hair punched in it and not much else.
Soon after that, I was making ones that were a little bit larger and
more detailed.
Had a lot more hair, had teeth and gums.
After that, they just sort of grew and grew and grew to have larger and more
varied body parts and more complicated types of skin and also a wider variety.
Dry skin, oily skin, wrinkled skin, smooth skin.
And oftentimes, they have a mutation or an oddity that is found in the human body.
So what I will do is I will research that.
I never incorporate animals or other mammals into them.
That said, I always draw the line at any type of violent image.
I never include Fleshlettes that have wounds, that are bleeding,
that are cut open, anything like that.
Because in my mind, that's not what I'm interested in.
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I like to give them all names, because for
one it's the only really easy way to talk about them.
Because otherwise, it's just the one that has teeth,
no the other one that has teeth that's kinda of like it, but more of a scrotum.
So this way, they're really easy to definitively and quickly tell them apart.
This one is called Tonya, the Tooth Tongue.
There is a syndrome that people get sometimes where when they have their jaw
wired shut and they can't use their mouth for prolonged periods of time,
they get a sort of hair.
Although, it's not really hair and
I don't remember what the medical condition is called.
But it creates sort of a mat on the back of the tongue and
I always thought that was really gross, and
then I thought teeth coming out of the tongue would be a really great image.
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My immediate family, my wife, my son, they all like the Fleshlettes.
But my parents are obviously from a different generation and
they find them to be pretty disturbing, and they don't understand why their little
country boy from Northwestern Montana is making these bizarre monsters.
I'm not really honestly not trying to gross people out.
I just find them to be a really kind of fun,
weird way of looking at the human body.
Things that aren't considered beautiful or sort of outside of the norm.
They're fun for me, but also I take them very seriously.
I think the reason people can relate to them which I never thought would happen
is because they share things that we all share.
Maybe a tongue with teeth growing out of it which we don't have, but
we all have tongues and they're very sensitive parts of our
bodies that immediately elicit reactions when we see them.
I think ultimately that's why Fleshlette has become this weird successful
thing that resonates with a certain group of people.
They can kind of understand in a weird way how this completely
abnormal creature feels.
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