3 Artists/ Designers who have broken the rules

Hananuma Masakichi

When this Japanese artist learned he was dying from tuberculosis, he decided he wanted to leave a parting gift to the woman he loved. He decided to make her a life-like statue of himself that ended up looking so real that it was so hard to tell the real Hananuma from the statue when they stood next to each other.

He made each body part separately using dark wood which was painted and lacquered to match his skin tone. He made a tiny individual hole for every pore in his body, then plucked out his own hair and inserted into the exact same position in the statue. He removed his own teeth, finger and toe nails which he also placed on the statue. For a final touch, he gave the statue his glasses and clothes.

He lived another 10 years and ironically died out of poverty despite his talent in 1985.

Edward Theodore Gein

Police suspected Gein to be involved in the disappearance of a store clerk, Bernice Worden, in Plainfield on November 16, 1957. Upon entering a shed on his property, they made their first horrific discovery of the night: Worden’s corpse. She had been decapitated, her headless body hung upside down by means of ropes at her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. Most horribly, the body’s trunk was empty, the ribcage split and the body “dressed out” like that of a deer. These mutilations had been performed postmortem; she had been shot at close-range with a .22-caliber rifle.

Searching the house, authorities found:

• Human skulls mounted upon the cornerposts of his bed
• Human skin fashioned into a lampshade and used to upholster chair seats
• Human skullcaps, apparently in use as soup bowls
• A human heart (it is disputed where the heart was found; the deputies’ reports all claim that the heart was in a saucepan on the stove, with some crime scene photographers claiming it was in a paper bag)
• The head of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, found in a paper bag
• A ceiling light pull consisting of human lips
• A “mammary vest” crafted from the skin of a woman’s torso
• A belt made from several human nipples, among many other such grisly objects
• Socks made from human flesh

H.H Holmes

H.H Holmes renovated a three story hotel specifically to kill people. It included stairways to nowhere and a maze over 100 windowless rooms. He killed as many as 200 people in it. The skeletons of his victims were sold to medical schools.