“At a certain point in my personal life I became interested in working through trauma, not ruminating on it.”
From the start of your career until now, tell us about the evolution of your works. What sort of subjects were you creating in the beginning and how did they change into the figures we’re seeing now?
I guess my career really started with me making this photocopied zine series called Sad Sex, beginning in 2008. I made ten issues between then and around 2011ish. I had been making art for a long time before that but that was when I started disseminating my work, in zine format, and starting to figure out my style, so I think that feels like the beginning of my career. I was 18 when I started making those zines, so the work was reflective of my 18 year old mental landscape – it was super angsty in a very specific late teens way, it was all about sex and romance feeling twisted and hopeless to me, and the work was extremely graphic. It was all line drawings, black and white, and depicted people fucking and crying, was the entire concept. I was um, going through a lot at the time, haha. The work itself was also really like…meticulous is not the word, more like obsessive. At that time I did a lot of Adderall, I would get so hopped up and just sit at my desk drawing for 12 or 13 hours straight at a time, chain-smoking, until my hand was literally numb. The work reflects that I think, the tiny tiny patterns I got lost in drawing are psychotic looking in retrospect.
As I got healthier as a person over time, and also just got older and my mental landscape changed, my work changed, because my work has always been diaristic. At a certain point in my personal life I became interested in working through trauma, not ruminating on it. As I became concerned with different things and a bit more nuanced in my perception of sex and romance being twisted, less just “fuck it all” about everything, I think my work became more nuanced. I felt less strongly about my work just being a receptacle for me to expel intense bad emotions and thoughts, and more about being a place to work through those things, part of that is a process of expulsion still but as time has gone on I’ve become interested in kind of showing the duality and complication of things more, less just about the abject. The main thing is that I stopped literally drawing people having sex, that just stopped being important to me.
My work still contains a lot of nudity, but I’m not literally drawing partnered sex the way I was before. That was of interest to me at the time, not anymore. Now it’s more about creating these female figures, kind of avatars for different aspects of my mental landscape, who visibly contain multitudes, the abject and the anguish is definitely still there but I want to also try to manifest power and strength and resilience through them too, like goddesses who readily show their human sides too.
From mythological scenes to abstracted visuals of everyday objects, tell us about your sources of inspirations and the themes imbued in your works.
I do use references for poses fairly often — that’s usually pulled from old porn, found photographs, photography books, or photos I take of myself for reference — but as far as the thematic genesis of my works, they feel very organic, like it’s less of a concrete reference point I’m ever using and more just extremely diaristic and personal, whatever I’m feeling and thinking about and working through in my personal life at the time. I guess my formula is basically that there’s a figure – or recently, multiple figures – and I’m placing them in a situation – the setting, the environment, the actions they’re taking, the objects they’re surrounded by — that are intended to tell a story about what that girl is going through, what she’s thinking about, how she’s feeling. It feels like maybe every year or two I pick up a few new symbols for my like, bank of objects I pull from – the 50’s romance inspired couples kissing in clouds in the sky or coming out of flowers, the shattered mirror, the giant boots that have short poems written on their straps, a snake. These moments all hold different symbolism for me, most of them can have multiple meanings, and I like mixing them in different combinations to try to convey different stories.
I always want my girls to be conveying a sense of duality, like I feel in my own life — struggling with difficult negative emotional experiences like body dysmorphia or memories of traumatic incidents, for example, but simultaneously also holding things I view as positive emotional experiences, like feeling connected to nature, being in touch with her sexuality, whatever. I want my work to hold all of these intense, conflicting emotions at the same time, because that’s how I feel. Creating a painting of a woman covered in scratches to me is about the pain of self harm inflicted because she’s so upset with her physical form, but in that same image she’s horny and surrounded by beautiful flowers, it isn’t all bad and she knows that even in the darkest moments. It’s a bit hard for me to write about my own work, because the entire reason why I make my work is because I need to paint and draw these things to express them, otherwise I’d be a writer, haha. I guess I have just always been a person who feels like I feel everything really hard at the same time and I’m trying to depict that in my drawings, because that expulsion of the hard stuff feels good, especially when I can also make it beautiful, make it being experienced by a big strong sexy intense otherworldly cowgirl bitch, it makes me feel better about the fact that I’m going through that too, if she is, we’re in it together. I’m actually in therapy for the first time in my life right now and I think it’s really starting to change my work — because a lot of stuff is coming up to the surface. It’s going to be interesting.
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wazup.