Ceramics, Circus Trains, and Church Snakes: An Interview with the Multi-dimensional Moth Flock
Hellmouth sits down with Michael Arpino to discuss his imaginative artistic practices that encapsulate a number of creative modalities.
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Arpino, who creates under the moniker of “The Moth Flock”, has developed abstract worlds that play upon the rich history of Appalachia, whether it be the rampant religious fervor or industrial railroads that materialized Knoxville’s very existence. His ceramics are whimsical, yet haunting; his writing is haunting, yet satirical.
In this interview, we discuss his background and artistic identity that draws from both his Appalachian heritage and partially Catholic upbringing. Starting with two-dimensional work and transitioning to ceramic in 2016, Arpino features recurring mythological figures and explores Southern Gothic themes through a lens that is simultaneously ominous and tongue-in-cheek. Recently, Arpino has expanded into creating a novel with non-chronological chapters to tie together his visual motifs, focusing on a circus train narrative set in an ambiguous Appalachian setting that blends different time periods. In an artistic landscape that often demands clear categorization, Arpino's refusal to be constrained by medium, genre, or regional expectations feels like both a personal liberation and an invitation to viewers to similarly break free from conventional boundaries.
The Moth Flock continues to flutter between worlds, illuminating the strange beauty that exists in the shadows of the everyday.
In the deepest trenches of winter, I wander through the old, brown gray of the Old City. My breath fogs the air before me, my nose hurts from the bite of the cold. As I pass the Pilot Light, I think of the reason I’m here; caught off-guard, scrolling one late night on Instagram, struck by the image that rolled up on my screen. It’s not often that a doomscrolling session will evoke a response from me that is anything but, well, doom, or even strike me in a meaningful way.
Yet this diorama of the Pilot Light—created by @themothflock—was certainly an exception. Click more, scroll more, boom, yes, I’m in love. Meticulous 3D dioramas of that haunting kitsch that is so unique to the South and Appalachia can be so difficult to grasp, and yet this artist, I found, managed to wrap these qualities into a beautiful, contained object.
And so, now, here I stood, nose-running and eyes bleary, in Java Coffee, ready to meet the artist himself. Michael sits across from me with clear eyes and speaks with not only an Appalachian drawl, but also with a certain candor and intention that I envy (trust that I managed to edit out some of my more tangential ramblings). Throughout our conversation, crumbs from the delicious Wild Love Bakery treat collect on my lap as I listen to Michael with rapt attention.
HM: I discovered your art on Instagram and thought it really fit our mission and vision. Have you always been practicing art? Like, how long have you been creating?
MA: My whole life, honestly. But I really started taking it seriously in probably 2013. I graduated from Maryville College in 2012, and I was kind of shambled around for a season or two. I felt like I was hurled from this very insular community and out into the adult world. My Pepawgrandfather told me that I needed to start drawing more creatures, critters, and doing children’s illustrations. He saw that potential for me. And that’s when Moth Flock was born.
HM: Why the name Moth Flock?
MA: The origins of it I don’t 100% remember. I had a friend in college who went on some kind of spirit journey and came back and told me that I was a flock of moths or something like that. I liked that—so that might’ve been apocryphal, but it stuck, and now it’s tied up in my identity, and that’s when I first drew the Hexacat, which has kind of become my icon.
MA: I carved it from wood early on and started doing some screenprinting, some painting, and from there, expanded my artistic narrative.
I describe myself as a revelatory folk artist—a term I heard on a music blog once. My art, in a sense, gradually emerges from these embryonic ideas. Over the past decade and more, I’ve fleshed them out in different ways and reinterpreted them and played with new media—new physical media—and went back to exploring and reconfiguring old ideas.
HM: It is interesting to hear you talk about your process through different types of media. Now, I feel like your work is so sculptural and dimensional. It demands a presence. I’m curious about that evolution from the two-dimensional in screen printing to the three-dimensional—was there a particular trigger point for you?
MA: You know, that’s a good question. Pottery is definitely my main focus these days, starting in 2016, which is when I started getting really into plants. I mean, I’ve always been into plants and gardening, but in 2016 is when I really started getting into it.
I’d be on Instagram, and I would see these Japanese ceramic artists who have these crazy exotic plants potted in these wild planters.
I would translate the captions to try and figure out what they were, and the captions were always like—Hello, pretty day today. No elaboration on the pottery or explanation as to what it was. Not even like a genus or species for the plants that were potted. So I thought, okay, well, I’m going to learn ceramics, and I’m going to make my own.
So I went to Mighty Mud’s studio and started making planters while still painting at the time—a practice I’ve never really divorced myself from.
MA: And then, 2020 rolled around and the world went to hell. But there was this houseplant trend where people were buying these planters like crazy, so I went really hard into ceramics at that point.
When that petered out, I regrouped with my artistic identity. I thought, What other ways can I use ceramic media? So I’ve started sculpting a lot of figures for my Moth Flock mythology and realizing them in three-dimensional ceramic.
HM: Tell me more about the Moth Flock mythology.
MA: It relates back to revelatory art—it’s being revealed to me over time, even as the creator.
And while I am ultimately the creator of these things, I feel like I stumble into images the same way one would stumble into a spider web in the middle of the night when you’re walking around the woods.
Like, I’ll be driving and suddenly stricken with an image. At the first opportunity I get, I draw or write it down. I pluck imagery out of the air—recurring figures or characters—and they’ve gradually evolved [with their own agency]. There’s not really an explicit narrative involved; it’s implicit and very commensurate on how the viewer interprets them. Like any art.
HM: Are these revelatory moments that are, like, akin to being struck by lightning specific to just visual art?
MA: Well, I’m writing a novel now, to hopefully tie it together more explicitly [and] to create, like, a metafictional origin for archetypes like the Hexacat. It’s to tie together these recurring figures into a shared semi-fictional, semi-tongue-in-cheek Universe.
HM: As a writer myself, I resonate with this. When I’m writing, and I’m really tuned in, I feel like I’m channeling. Like I’m the medium for something greater than myself in a way.
MA: I’ve told people before that I feel more of a conduit than a creator.
HM: Writing as a way for the Universe to move through you. It can feel very spiritual.
MA: My paternal grandmother—my memaw, my dad’s mother—was a Catholic and very mystical. She would light candles to the saints, and her mother had visions of the Virgin Mary and things like that. I was raised within it. She encouraged my art from when I was a child. And her husband—my pepaw—would always hand me books. I would be seven years old and reading Ernest Hemingway.
My mom’s side of the The other side of my family comes from Appalachia. My nana was giving me her very nice oil paints when I was a little kid. I would sit there and just crank out paintings. And then my granddaddy—her husband—was a carpenter. He was very Appalachian, I mean: Plum yonder directly, I reckon, was how he would communicate where something was. He would carry walk me around their yard and show me every bug and every plant.
“Before there was anything, there was a Naturalist. The Naturalist crawled through the darkness for eons until they found a tiny bright white spot. Curious, the Naturalist took out their magnifying glass and had a closer look. Inside the spot, they saw everything that ever will be. Seeing that it was good, the Naturalist touched the spot and let it all out.”
– Michael Arpino
MA: So these two halves of my genealogy were very impactful for me. I’ve leaned really heavily into the Appalachian part just because it’s unavoidable living in the South and talking like I do with my accent.
HM: How much has Appalachian folklore influenced your art?
MA: Quite a bit. My Appalachian identity is really key. But there have been times where I felt pigeonholed by it. In 2017, I did an art show called Fearsome Critters, where I was painting these very totemic representations of mainly native critters, like possums and raccoons and deer. And I kind of had a moment after that show where I felt trapped by my leaning so heavily into my Appalachian identity. And I couldn’t make anything else. So it’s taken some unlearning since then to realize that I can reconcile my artistic vision.
HM: How does that unlearning manifest for you?
MA: Approaching the novel has given me a permission structure to branch out into other media that may not be traditionally associated with Appalachian folk artists. I had to give myself permission to fan out from that.
HM: I was also raised Catholic. It’s surprising sometimes when I’m writing how much that impacts the imagery that spills out of me. At Hellmouth, we are interested in this return to the sacred, but with the understanding of all the complicated structures and institutions that make up the church. It’s actually what attracted me to your work—I love your dioramas of the churches.
MA: Yeah, that was a fun one. That show was called Coffin Holler. Back in like 2018, I was sitting at Honeybee Coffee in South Knoxville, sitting on the patio and writing Coffin Holler on the top of this page and thinking: Okay, I want to do this Southern Gothic, Appalachian, folk horror, multimedia, immersive art show with automatons and 2D art and whatever, so I started coming up with all these crazy concepts.
I had ideas for, like, a headless moonshine runner or a Greek chorus of singing ugly jugs or confederate vampires that were forced for all eternity to tap dance in a house that was sinking into a swamp—but I never managed to integrate them. I planned to in 2020, but as we all know, the world went to shit, and it was put on the back burner.
But this past year, in the spring, I thought—you know what, it’s time for Coffin Holler.
HM: Why did you choose dioramas as your way of communicating this vision?
MA: I used to be fascinated with model railroads when I was little—
HM: I’m obsessed with trains.
MA: You’ll love this, then. In my book, a circus train is one of the three climactic scenes that’s tying together the Moth Flock mythology.
HM: Again, obsessed.
MA: It’s implied that it takes place in South Knoxville, the tracks at Ijams. Not explicitly, implicitly.
HM: Man, you know they’re tearing up the tracks there.
MA: That’s… that’s a bummer. Why’s that?
HM: They’re replacing it with a greenway. Which is great, but I would love to see the tracks utilized for a light rail, to provide transportation and accessibility for people. They could do both—a greenway and a light rail.
MA: I’ve had no problem walking on the tracks. It was my greenway. And it obviously influenced me—and I had all this model railroad stuff lying around from my childhood, and I thought to make Southern Gothic folklore dioramas.
So I built this little illuminated house under a bell jar—a glass cloche that I dumpster dove—which ended up being my favorite from the show. I think it’s called Dark Thirty. It’s this gray house covered with a dilapidated roof, illuminated from the inside. It had real lace curtains in it that I made from tiny little pieces of laces.
I was trying to capture those homes you see when you’re driving around the rural South. You know the ones. They look like a waiting animal in the bushes with their hollow window eyes. But they’re beautiful.
Dark Thirty
HM: And how did the series blossom from there?
MA: I asked myself, What kind of things do I want to represent in miniature? I thought: roadside signs—like HELL IS REAL, like boiled peanuts, like gun shows.
HM: I think a lot of people would approach this imagery like it’s a dark and scary and evil thing.
MA: Yeah, it totally is. It’s ominous and foreboding and has very negative undertones, but it’s also kitschy at the same time. Hence my giant, bold HELL IS REAL signs. And my church interior that has snakes emerging from an altar with a flickering red light titled CONGREGATION, which was very intentional. My tongue is very firmly pressed to my cheek when I’m doing this kind of thing.
HM: I’m very curious to see how these themes emerge in your novel as well. Will there be—or is there, as it unfolds, experimentation in your form, just as there has been with your visual work?
MA: Yes. I’ve been reading a lot of postmodern literature lately. A lot of ergodic books that make you work for it. You have to rotate the book, you have to check footnotes, it’s printed in weird typefaces.
HM: House of Leaves?
MA: House of Leaves is one, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is another. Also S by Doug Dorst. And as I moved through these books, I realized that a story could be what I want it to be. It doesn’t have to fit into any set structure. I can write without any preconceived notion of what this has to be.
So my chapters are not in chronological order, but they can be read in any way you want, and the narrative will still make sense. That was incidental. I didn’t intend for that, but that’s how it’s turning out. I’m playing with a lot of tropes, a lot of metafictional stuff, a lot of self-referential stuff.
HM: How do you intend to ground the narrative?
MA: The crux of one of the plot lines is centered around a circus train. I’ve been diving into nineteenth-century circus terminology and steam engine operation and that kind of thing. Reading manuals because I want it to be real. But at the same time, I’m leaning into the ontological mystery in that the setting is not explicit.
HM: Can I have some insight into the content?
MA: In one story, the circus train picks up one of the antagonists in Coffin Holler. It’s in Appalachia, and while [the characters] use the regional term “Appalachia”, it’s clearly not set in an America that we know or even a clear time period. There’s a lot of anachronistic schizotech.
HM: I am curious about this intersection of such a strong sense of geographical place while also leaning hard into the liminality of culture and time. What are some other ways this manifests in your work?
MA: Hm.
HM: I know that the scramble of culture and time, while this sudden stagnation of geography was very pertinent to me during the pandemic. You brought up the pandemic twice—everything halting and going to shit.
MA: Right. I’m a retail manager at Williams-Sonoma, and during the pandemic, I was going into the abandoned mall with one other guy, Terry, and using it as a fulfillment center. I was a, quote-unquote, essential worker just drop-shipping online orders.
This is when I started getting really acquainted with liminal spaces and liminality. I started a series of paintings that I called Master’s Chambers—which, that’s a line from Hotel California—and these were eerie, kind of simplistic paintings of interiors with nonsensical doors, windows… and I would paint a little ghost in all of them. So people made a game out of finding the ghost in all of them.
HM: So, like, a liminal space game of Where’s Waldo?
MA: Yeah, in a way! But that's when I started to lean really heavily into liminality… there was this aspect of the paintings, too, of these inescapable rooms and buildings that don’t make sense. I was definitely influenced by the fact that I was working in an abandoned mall—especially with all this imagery of people stuck in houses and whatnot.
The reminder of being stuck in a house—in a cloying, oppressive atmosphere—sparks a sudden urge to flee the otherwise cozy coffeeshop. We stand, we walk through the Old City and towards the North. I ramble, hooked on his mention of schizotech, about TempleOS, an operating software meant to act as the Third Testament of the Bible, created by a man with schizophrenia.
Michael listens, careful and thoughtful, until we arrive at Emory Place. There’s a moment—a quiet moment—where he is framed by the cemetery and St. John’s Lutheran, two essences of his artistic practices, and the sun peaks just through the clouds glinting off the stained glass.
I consider the creator;
I consider the conduit.
We walk on, into the haze of winter.
Michael’s ceramics are available for purchase here; you can follow his artist journey on Instagram via @themothflock.
