Moss Iconography
On maximalist trash fairy assemblages, Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, and Eve Plumb's childhood bedroom door
By Erin K Drew
Girlies just want to have grottoes, shrines to something wild and ragged, fairy houses for smaller versions of themselves– feral Polly Pockets, Littlest Pet Shoppes cast in pewter, stuffed with moss and mushrooms. Alien ant farms. Doe-eyed Realtree hoboes with survival knives and ephemeral dildos hang around truck stops, washing their hair with garden hoses, subsisting on energy drinks and ephedrine, exotic jerky and astronaut ice cream, shakin it for the locals in the littlest shadow box – a diorama of a bat cave inside a flatscreen’s packaging – in stripper platforms full of slugs.
above: Anna Sew Hoy, “A Dark Drying Scent,” 2023 (left), Lizette Hernandez, “Remedio Perpetuo,” 2022 (right). Images from the artists’ websites.
Tell me a story with a bacteria protagonist, something where the virus wins. A rosary wound around a raw loofah. Anal strain and softness, leavings. A series of sarcophagi, ramekins full of baby teeth and lime green eyeshadow. A set of secret steps inside my lungs. Inhalants, aphrodisiacs, scented air climbs inside.
above: Jenna Beasley, “Quatrefoil 2,” 2022 (left), Emily Budd, “A Good Gig Dream” (Detail), 2021. Images from the artists’ websites.
A punk band plays in a rotten vestibule, a rectory run by skunks. The high piled patterned carpet is stained with wine. There’s fucking in the dark. Ribbons wrapped around ribs in water. The witchy feminine, as coined by Rebecca Solnit, branded by stray hair and spider eggs, is updated and undead.
***
I meet Tanya on an unassuming street in Simi Valley, lined with condominiums. Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey’s compound is hiding in plain sight. Tanya unlocks the gates and guides us across the mosaic walkways embedded with pink and turquoise ceramic tiles, horseshoes and aluminum toy pistols. An earthquake destabilized the buildings on the property, but some of Grandma’s doll constructions are visible through gaps in the poured concrete structures bathed in crepuscular light filtering through jewel toned glass.
Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, 2023. Images Erin K Drew. For gorgeous photos of the site check out Kathi Hofer’s project.
Tanya lets me into Grandma’s trailer at the center of the site. As if her life’s work wasn’t enough, I get to investigate where she washed and slept, ate dinner in modest confines. The walls inside are painted bright blue and speckled with mementos. Her pencil sculptures are stored here.
Of Grandma’s output, the pencil pieces enchant me most, both for their inventive use of graphite and their makeshift beauty. Freshly sharpened pencils adorn Valentine hearts with paper frills. They radiate in bullseye patterns on wooden disks trimmed in lace.
As a child I’d clean my parents’ junk drawer by assembling “treasure chests” for my dolls from the items found – tiny springs, plastic caps from chair legs, broken fridge magnets and foil I’d roll into balls. Pencils were ubiquitous and irritating in their pointlessness. Seeing them deployed as material, milked for their shape and color pleases me.
Eve Plumb’s childhood bedroom door at the Valley Relics Museum, 2025.
Eve Plumb’s bedroom door is a garden of earthly delights, encrusted with hundreds of stickers from the 1970s, spot-lit at the Valley Relics Museum. Day glo daisies sprout next to Wacky Package parodies (Chef Girl-ardee Feminist Spaghetti). Mickey Mouse coexists with Rat Fink, both dwarfed by a leggy Road Runner. Stop signs say Start ! The Pope Smokes Dope ! The earnest kisses the edgy; an adolescent girl is in dialogue with design.
What’s the right place for stickers anyway ? My minimalist inclinations reared their heads when I refused to peel my Lisa Frank sticker sheets apart. They were so perfect intact. Friends had bewitching collections affixed to the sides of their dressers, their headboards, the windows of their parents’ cars, free associative assemblages of Highlights Magazine dinosaurs next to the holographic, flocked and Scratch and sniff.
Brady Bunch imagery haunted my preadolescence, formed my identification with kitsch. The Brady Bunch movie afforded me my first glimpse of Rupaul, exposed me to Shocking Blue’s “Venus.” I went to the mixer in a shirt that said “Marcia Marcia Marcia,” wore it as I made my first zine, meticulously cutting out shapes while Sleater Kinney filled the air.
Q: Where is it now ?
A: Enshrined in my memory palace behind Jan Brady’s bedroom door.
Works cited:
Solnit, Rebecca. As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender And Art. University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Hofer, Kathi. “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, Spector Books, 2021.
Erin K Drew is an interdisciplinary artist, arts organizer, researcher and educator. Ongoing interests include American semiotics and folk forms, place, class, education and entertainment. She has written and documented visual culture from her vantage extensively through her blog Extreme Appearances and, most recentlty, on Substack @ Museum Putty.
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on February 16, 2025.