What in the Hell?

Here you can read my artist statement.

Artist Statement

My graphic novel practice is rooted in the transformation of lived experience into fictional worlds. I use illustration, graphic storytelling, humour, absurdity, and visual metaphor to examine the systems and environments that shape everyday life. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the individual and the institution (so to speak).  My work tries to examine how people recover or maintain their sense of identity, humour, connection, and humanity while existing and navigating systems that often prioritize efficiency, regulation, liability, and policy. 

I am drawn to the space between the familiar and the fantastic. Rather than reproducing experiences literally, I transform them.  Workplace objects become creatures, the understanding or emotions felt in my environment becomes the basis for the landscapes, ordinary work language takes on new meanings, and familiar people become exaggerated characters. This transformation creates distance, but it also creates a way of looking more closely. By making something recognizable unfamiliar, I can minimize effects while examining its structures, contradictions, and emotional weight.

Transformation and fantasy is an important part of this process. I am interested in fantasy because difficult lived experiences are transformed in imaginary places.  Fantasy allows distance and space which is necessary for processing and gives an avenue for me to approach experiences that are difficult to confront directly. 

My current work, What in the Hell?, grows out of my experience within a large, highly regulated professional environment. Rather than making a literal account of that experience, I have created a fictional non-religious Hell populated by sexy demonic hotdogs. The characters allow me to explore depersonalization, professional identity, institutional power, workplace trauma, friendship, and the preservation of individuality without reproducing the real-world environment directly.

I am particularly interested in the ways professional identity as defined by large institutions is constructed through appearance and behaviour. Uniforms, grooming standards, language, workplace etiquette, and expectations of professionalism can create a recognizable collective identity while simultaneously obscuring the individual. In my work, character design becomes a way to highlight how individuals within the system push against that erasure. Hair, makeup, clothing, gestures, language, and other small details become meaningful expressions of personality. The characters are inspired by hotdogs, arguably the most conformist and individually indistinct of all foods.  My current work tries to show how individuals moulded through a system, working in a traumatic environment will nonetheless labour to maintain their dignity and individual identities.

My approach is also informed by manga, comics, and illustration, particularly the work of Naoko Takeuchi, creator of Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon presents an iconic female protagonist who confronts evil alongside a team of Sailor Guardians. And in parallel to the real world, regardless of the scale and magnitude of threats; it is friendship, loyalty, and hope that remain central to any girl gang’s power to resist them.

Ultimately, my practice is about observing how both the users and workers of large institutional systems interact, exist, experience, and navigate the environment and each other.  I use fantasy and transformation to make space for difficult subjects, and humour to create distance for processing. I am interested in making work that can operate simultaneously as a personal act of processing and as a shared language for people who recognize something of their own experiences within the work while maintaining some obscurement from those who have limited meaningful exposure to systemic institutions. What in the Hell? is one manifestation of a larger practice which is my attempt to turn lived experience of institutional difficulty into a world that is multiperspective, silly, recognizable, and full of grace.