Ben Venom is by my nickname since I was a teenager. I got it from my hang around the Atlanta punk rock scene. Everyone had a nickname that I knew back then and I was Venom. Ben Venom. The work I'm doing now, I think about it, has two opposing forces colliding where you have like heavy metal which is tough and loud and fast and you have quilting which is soft and kind of slow and won't hurt anybody and I just kind of go like this and then you got quilting with heavy metal and I kind of want to be right in that middle where something explodes and then something new happens. I kind of like to break through those boundaries. I'm definitely not your typical quilter and been then on top of that I'm making some like very strong and kind of aggressive or scary imagery. All my work definitely has a strong conceptual base to it but this operates on a couple different levels where even if you're not really familiar with art at all and you know Slayer you know Armaid and you know Metallica that's something you can take away from seeing my work. People are able to directly relate to it on just like on a base level. There's a lot of underlying humor to the work too. It goes beyond the heavy metal that goes into like a little bit of mythology and then definitely the occult. At Arle these shirts line around for many years that I would be wearing and some of them I had to retire because they just got too threadbare. I had a show in Berlin, Germany and I decided to pull the shirts out and cut those up because they're just nothing left of them. I'd already been doing a lot of sewing at that time so I just thought I'd take it to the next level and make it into a quilt so heavy metal quilt was born. I've got a lot of comments about oh this works really interesting who'd you pay to make it. They thought I had a bunch of old ladies in my garage that I didn't tell anybody about and I was just like down there like cracking the whip on them to like make everything for me and then I was just signing my name at the end of the day. I was like no no no no no it's all done by me. I'm not farming it out through a grandmother or anything like that. I wasn't trying to go and have a perfectly clean piece. There's more about the idea. I would say like 95% of the shirts on the quilts on all my quilts are bands that I listen to. A big part of that is I want to be into the band that I'm gonna use the shirt from. I try to use ones that I've been worn. It's a new life for them. It's like a different phase. They weren't able to be worn as shirts anymore so now they're in a different form. They serve a totally different function now and we'll kind of live on for a little bit longer.