Gothic Bite Magazine is a platform for the indie community to promote their work and art. We want to share your horror, gothic, gloomy, macabre, and grotesque side to the world. This week, James McCoy shares with us his digital work and story.

About James McCoy

My work primarily lies in the fields of digital photography and image manipulation.

I draw upon a wide range of inspiration, from modern artists Seth Anton and Travis Smith to mediaeval, macabre, religious mythologies and contemporary extreme metal and film.

However, some of my more complex pieces now include digital painting elements.

My artwork and photography are an extension of my professional and personal interests. Academically, one of my areas of academic study is burial patterns and mortuary culture of Antebellum America.

Consequently, my photography began as a personal project, documenting antebellum headstones in my local region. From there, my artwork became an outgrowth of my study of mortuary art.

Eerie Contradictions

The idea of Liminal Space—that murky, indistinct borderland between places, people, and ideas—has always fascinated me. The strange duality that Liminal Space creates in all things that dwell therein.

Complementarily, through photography and image manipulation, I seek to explore the places and characters that inhabit the ‘space between.’

I use ambiguity, contradiction, and conflicting elements to create a disquiet, dark, eerie, surreal, and haunted worlds filled with broken ambiguous characters.

The Esoteric Artist

For me, Horror and Neo-Gothic styles are naturally complementary to my personal and professional interests. I feel the styles are, perhaps, two of the most advantageous techniques for exploring darker themes.

Horror allows individuals and societies to explore cultural and personal anxieties and discomforts. The style enables both creators and viewers to share a fictive environment so both can work through anxieties and fears in healthy ways.

Neo-Gothicism is a rebellion against the common. The style allows artists to present abstruse and esoteric subjects as unfamiliar inversions. This gives the artist novel ways to challenge socially accepted perceptions and preconceived understandings of subjects.

James McCoy