Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Nicole Parish, a Utah artist with autism, turned her insect fascination into a business.
- Parish, who has 3 million TikTok followers, paints insects and educates on bugs.
- Her autism aids her focus on insects, which she says are very predictable.
SALT LAKE CITY — Google "cicada ribs," and at the top of the search results, you'll likely find Nicole Parish. That's because no one is more enthusiastic about the insect, its physical feats or insects as a whole, than this Utah artist. And that's in part due, she says, to the fact that she has autism.
The story begins years ago when Parish and her brother, Davin, were kids looking for bugs in the backyard.
"We raised a lot of praying mantises. … We would let the praying mantises, like, roam and explore our bedroom," she says.
"We had black widows and a cat-faced spider," Davin said. "That was probably one of our favorites, because we just put it (the cat-faced spider) in the corner of our closet (not in a jar or terrarium), and our mom didn't know about it till she put some laundry away, and she just found it living in the closet."
Parish read the novel "A Girl of the Limberlost" by writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter, about a girl named Eleanor who learns to collect insects as a way to pay for school.
"It's the book that introduced me to the possibility of like caring for insects and raising them and preserving them," she said.
Parish thought about insects all the time.
"I struggled to stop thinking about bugs," she said.
It wasn't until she was a young adult that she found out why when she was diagnosed with autism.
Many people with autism have what are called "special interests," an intense and focused interest in something. Autism is also why, she says, bugs in particular appealed to her.
Like many people with her condition, she has a hard time reading social cues. Humans are hard to understand, but bugs are not so nuanced.
"They're very predictable," she said. "They have, like, their instincts and their patterns of behavior. Even though we do have patterns of behavior, it changes drastically from individual to individual, and then there's a lot of nuance culturally."
Obsessions aren't always a good thing, but this one's helped her art career. She works at home painting insects.
Her condition precluded going to college – too much sensory input can cause meltdowns; that's why she often wears noise-canceling headphones – so she apprenticed with artist Casey Childs.
The day we visited, she was working on a canvas with a number of different cicadas — there are 3,000 different kinds around the world, using a handful of real cicadas pinned to a sheet of Styrofoam as a reference.
She has more than 2,000 bugs displayed around her home and in an insect library in her closet.
She also has a few live insect pets, including a number of Domino cockroaches, Dubia cockroaches, Hercules beetles that she collected at one particular gas station in south-central Utah and, in her basement, a hibernating giant African millipede.
On social media — she has 3 million followers on TikTok — she discusses insects and autism with a cheery exuberance.
Ask her about cicada ribs and she happily launches into a well-rehearsed, rapid patter about how the bug flexes the ribs 400 times persecond to produce its signature whine and amplifies the sound with a hollow chamber in its abdomen.
Sarah, an aide that helps her because of her autism, jokes that she's heard this monologue so many times she could deliver it herself.
Parish said people don't always understand her autism-related behaviors — she said sometimes a lot of people do, are bothered, or they stare or get frustrated — for the same reason they don't understand the insect world.
"I find a lot of people are scared of what they're not familiar with," she said.
"If people can see (insects) the way that I see them — that they're these beautiful creatures that are part of our world when you come to care about them — then you start to want to help preserve them and help care about our planet more," she said.
