Chainsaw art isn’t for everybody. But when it is, it becomes an obsession. Just ask former Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie, who has been carving for the past two decades. Relatively a new art form—it has only been around since the 1950s—there aren’t many chainsaw artists (and even fewer women who carve) other than a handful of budget horror movie villains wielding gas-guzzling dismembering machines beginning with 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Almost 23 years ago, the onetime corset-wearing teenage nymphet—who, along with her four equally fetching and feather-haired underage bandmates, kicked in rock’s glass ceiling in their sparkly platform shoes—found herself on the back of a motorcycle, speeding up the Pacific Coast Highway. As she scooted up the California coast, she wasn’t thinking about the multimillion-dollar beach properties to her left, or keeping her trademark platinum hair tucked under her helmet, wondering if her too-tight jeans were riding up, or whether she liked Shonen Knife’s cover of “Cherry Bomb.” Nope. Instead, she found herself suddenly transfixed by a cluster of wooden tikis, dolphins, and mermaids outside an art gallery as they approached Malibu’s infamous Kanan Road and a place called Malibu Mountain Gallery.

She didn’t ask her companion to stop to take a look at the carvings, but for the next two weeks, she didn’t think about much else. “I was on the back of a motorcycle—we were with a pack of other riders— and I just happened to glance over, and I saw these guys carving. I didn’t think about it immediately, but that little voice in my head would say to me every night before I went to bed, ‘You have to go back there!’ Every morning, when I got up, my little voice [in my head] would say, ‘You have to go back.’ It went on and on until I just said out loud: ‘I’ll go back!”’ Finally, she drove to the gallery on a weekday and approached the guy who looked like he owned the place. His name was Rio, and she told him, “I’d like to learn."