Artist Statement

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“Who am I, really?” As a relinquishment survivor (adoptee), these words burned in my core for decades. I began making art to answer this seemingly unanswerable question. I gravitated toward the storytelling medium of graphic memoir to discover accurate narratives about the complex human relationships and psychological challenges I’ve experienced in this life.

 

The visceral method of using ink and colored pencil on paper to unearth memories is vital to me. The physicality engages the central nervous system, and long buried visual details manifest when I’m immersed in this nonverbal pursuit. The drawings provide a base for the verbal, analytical elements that come next. Writing also begins on paper, as the manual labor of longhand feels appropriately like dredging a lake to me.

 

The transformation of these words and pictures into sequential art happens digitally. My decades of working in the graphics field naturally prepared me for putting the components together in InDesign. It’s there that the story gets fleshed out by employing the language of comics. The project comes full circle when it becomes a tangible object again, in the analog form of a book.

 

The drawings have always been paramount in my practice. I started out as a young artist making a wordless book in the tradition of Frans Masereel. I needed the graphite illustrations in my first book Whatever you wish to keep to say everything necessary. This stuck with me as I gained the courage to write, to chronicle things with more clarity. In my forthcoming book Snow Emergency Route - a tragicomic memoir, my wish is for the reader to slow down and enjoy the scenery as much as the words— perhaps as if they were strolling through a gallery.

 

I see my work as playing a role in a broader cultural movement, as society moves toward a greater understanding and culpability when it comes to adoption. My goal as a visual storyteller is to relay personal stories, and contemplate healing and survival. I see it as my job to bring this to a universal level, mirroring common human struggles, our quest for joy, understanding and forgiveness. Then the viewer can relate, and takeaway the wisdom I’ve gleaned by mining the past. If I can entertain, and make people laugh in the process, that’s the gold I seek. Drawing and memoir writing are my divining tools to this end.