The Heathen Apostles are again collaborating with goth artist Stephanie Inagaki, she will do the cover art on the band’s upcoming album Bloodgrass Vol. 3 & 4 (out Friday the 13th of May on Ratchet Blade Records). Stephanie previously did the cover art for the first Heathen Apostles album in the series, Bloodgrass Vol. 1 & 2, as well as appear in a music video from that release Death Came a Ridin’ (directed by Ashley Von Helsing).

Ver Mar, Stephanie Inagaki, Jonathan Cripple

Stephanie also makes fine art images and wearable art objects: portals to a realm of macabre fineries, Old World glamour, breathtaking mastery, rich symbolism, and deep wisdom. Meticulously crafted from sensuous and elemental mediums, each piece is made with love and tells a story of power and grace in the face of crisis, loss, and transformation. She is also the proprietress of Miyu Decay, meticulously and lovingly hand carves each design out of wax before going through the lost wax casting process.

Stephanie Inagaki‘s imagery is startling in its complex dualities. It manages to simultaneously contrast eroticism and violence, beauty and decay, life and death, all the while maintaining a harmonious and even sensuous balance of these themes. She brilliantly explores themes which are deeply personal to her by employing motifs that carry along the rich cultural traditions of her heritage and imbues them with her own meaning. Equally surrealistic and expressive, she mines her emotions and uses her body in order to create, in her own words, a “landscape where double self examinations occur through portraiture and self ruminations of the negative and positive…“

Deeply influenced by her continual studies in Middle Eastern dancing, Miyu Decay combines aesthetic elements from the Middle East, Africa, India, Europe, along with traditional Japanese designs.