The Eye Of A Clown

When I go to do work for a band or Slipknot and I’m looking for concepts, I have hundreds and hundreds of photos that I revise and go through. And when I was working on Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, there was a theme I needed to figure out. At the time, we were in a real weird place together as a band. We were reuniting and rehabilitating ourselves after the hellish Iowa cycle. So I kept asking myself, “What is it that ties us together?” And the answer has always been our fans. We wouldn’t be where we’re at if it wasn’t for our fans. So I felt like I needed to have something on the cover that represented that, and that’s how I came up with the maggot mask that we ended up using. This photo is one of the works that I made while I was searching for that final image.

This is one that obviously didn’t make it, but it helped me get to where I had to go. And it’s just one of dozens and dozens and dozens of attempts where I’m continuously searching. It takes me days. I never get it in one day. But I love this because there’s a lot of things you can see in it. At first glance, you might not see anything in it. And with another glance you might be able to put some things together in your mind. You can see there’s a zipper there. I always felt one of the things that really had a lot of symbolism in Slipknot masks were the zippers we always used for our mouths. So that’s why that zipper’s there. And then you have teeth on the inside like an X-ray. This particular picture was supposed to represent the view through the mask, but it’s so obscure that you could look at it and wonder if it’s an aerial map of some country.

And what is really is about is working towards grabbing the final piece. This is a revision of a previous piece. And then there was a piece after it and a piece after that and a piece after that and a piece after that until, finally, I got to the clarity. So to me, this represents not giving up until you get what you’re searching for and not settling for what it isn’t. And I always know — particularly with Slipknot — I always know when it’s it. And if I don’t have that feeling of it being completely it, it’s out.