Saturnalia Sideshow
Updated: 5 hours ago
I first met Morgan when she owned a brewery in Montrose, Pennsylvania.
She was behind the bar, pouring pints of spectacular ales, like Grasshopper, when I became almost instantly enamored with her beauty, her creative style, and her personality.
I knew we were going to be friends.
It was one of those unexplainable moments.
I looked at this woman with those luxurious attached ear lobes and just knew I had to get to know her. I had a feeling she was one of a kind.
As it turns out, I was right.
Over the years, Morgan and I have shared countless creative adventures, an appreciation for the odd and unusual, and a mutual inability to leave well enough alone.
We are both collectors of interesting things. Vintage clothing, curious objects, rocks, leaves, particularly wonderful twigs, and things most people would probably throw away.
We both look at an ordinary object and imagine an entirely different purpose for it.
We also share a rather dangerous approach to creativity.
There is no brake pedal.
There is no we can't do that. There is only yes, and...
Once one of our marvelous squirrel-like minds lands on an idea, the other is usually already figuring out how to make it happen. And oh, how those ideas expand.
Which surely explains how this particular project came to be.
One afternoon, while sitting in her crafting studio, she showed me a collection of old keys, wire, and a wheel. She had plans to turn them into a hanging mobile, with the keys suspended from lengths of wire.
I became completely fixated on the sound of those keys dangling from the wires.
And then I had an idea.
Before you attach those to the wheel...
I could already imagine them as part of a photographic accessory.
And so began a frenzy of metal scraps, hardware, and whatever else we could get our hands on.
Morgan began pulling out all manner of interesting things she'd been collecting over the years. Chains, bolts, bits of metal, and mysterious objects whose original purposes were of little concern to us.
We decided to create an entire collection of wearable sculptures made exclusively from metal. No glue. Just wire, bolts, and ingenuity.
At one point, we even ventured into her basement to cut pieces of metal from the supports holding up the ductwork.
As one does.
Over the following months, I would drive out to Morgan's house, where we'd spend hours experimenting, constructing, and figuring out how to make our increasingly elaborate ideas work. Morgan continued refining the pieces between our visits.
Eventually, we had four creations: a crown of nails, a headpiece fashioned from an old
steamer basket, a breastplate, and a collar of wire and keys.
All of this was happening in 2020, when the world had become a rather strange place.
Like so many people, we were craving connection, collaboration, and the freedom to create something simply for the pleasure of making it.
Our makeup artist for the day was my longtime collaborator and fellow lover of peculiar things, Jade.
By the time Saturnalia Sideshow came around, we'd already collaborated on numerous shoots, and this wasn't even her first time doing Morgan's makeup.
Our friend Jade joins us as makeup artist, as we prepare for the shoot in the back room of Morgan's brewery.
What followed was an afternoon of makeup, laughter, and Ice Cube's "You Can Do It" playing on an increasingly ridiculous loop in the brewery.
Every time the song started over, Jade and I would dissolve into laughter all over again.
A fitting soundtrack for the creation of a post-apocalyptic metal goddess, apparently.
We took our creations to a mountaintop in Pennsylvania, where we found an extraordinary playground of stone, cliffs, stacked logs, metal sculptures, and industrial remnants.
There was no shortage of places to explore or unusual things to incorporate into the photographs.
Days before the shoot, Morgan and I scout locations around the mountain. Her Great Pyrenees, Lupe, ensures we stay on task.
The resulting images were somewhere between a circus sideshow and a world that had been left to its own devices.
Looking through the photographs afterward, we gave the editorial its name:
Saturnalia Sideshow.
The series went on to be published in Art of Nude magazine, a wonderful conclusion to a project that had begun with a handful of keys and an entirely different idea.
What I remember most, though, isn't the publication.
It's the afternoons spent sitting on the floor of Morgan's craft studio, surrounded by piles of metal and possibility, with her kitten Saccharomyces crawling through our supplies and enthusiastically supervising the entire operation.
The tinkering, the problem-solving, the throw-your-head-back-laughter, and the excitement of watching an idea become something tangible.
The simple pleasure of making something unique and wonderful with a friend.
And as for that wheel and those keys that started the whole thing?
Morgan eventually made her mobile after all.
Six years later, while putting this journal entry together, she sent me a photograph of it hanging from a tree, the keys suspended from their long wires, just as she'd originally imagined.
I couldn't think of a more fitting ending to this story.
Or perhaps it's simply another beginning.
Until next time,
Credits:
Photography & Creative Direction - Mosh (@mosh_love)
Model & Wearable Art - Morgan Kelly (@saltwalk)
Makeup Artistry - Jade Soto (@jadesotomua)
Enjoy the Journal?
The Correspondence Club is a little more of this, delivered to your mailbox, the old- fashioned way. Each month, I send a fine art photograph and a personal letter filled with stories, curious discoveries, and whatever else has captured my imagination.
A little art. A little correspondence. Something lovely to look forward to.
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