Self-taught illustrator, zine maker, and librarian, selling drawings, prints, and little books

I have been making zines for a few years, and after a few requests I decided to make them available for purchase. I graduated with my Masters degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto. Since then, I have happily returned to drawing more frequently and am involved with several special library projects in Toronto.

Many of these drawings are inspired by fairytales I read as a child that were brimming with big-nosed monsters (such as Rumplestiltskin, goblins, beasts, and wolves) who threaten to harm skinny girls with long lustrous hair. I was always more interested in the monsters than the princesses. Over the years I transformed the monsters into more endearing and vulnerable creatures, almost pets, and made the princesses more sinister and complex than they appear in fairytales.

When I was younger I would stay with my dad during the weekends and, because he did not have a television, I would sit across from him on one side of his drafting table where for hours we would listen to the CBC and he would make wax jewelry carvings while I drew pictures copied from books of fairytales and Archie Comics. I still listen to the radio and draw, but now the characters I draw are chimeras of different gendered traits and ideals; the scary monsters are often small and dejected, the girls are powerful and mysterious, their exaggerated perfection uncanny. I am still inspired by a variety of graphic narratives such as Charles Burns’s satire of gendered nuclear family ideals found in 1950’s romance/ sci fi comics, and Dame Darcy’s feminine kitsch aesthetic, undercurrent in her uncanny gothic fairytales in Meat Cake. Dame Darcy draws her comics in a dainty feminine Victorian aesthetic, but her characters are loud, unrestrained, and grotesque. Fairytales inspire me to play with mythologized gender roles, ideologies of good and evil, and other Victorian ideals echoed in contemporary culture.

These drawings are also inspired by literature, such as Angela Carter’s book of retold fairytales The Bloody Chamber. There are no secret princes within these monsters, but the beauties still accept them, and the beauties are monsters too. The exaggerated perfection of the beauties is disturbing, like Carter’s mechanical maid in “The Tiger’s Bride”; their necks are too long and swan-like, eyes too large, and clothing constraining and decorative. The pretty dresses, bows, ribbons, and crowns on mermaids, princesses, and angels look strange and unnatural in dark black or faded blue ink, or a melted rainbow ice cream mess of colours. Sometimes, they are weapons of power and a source of comfort. The characters in these drawings are also sometimes unhappy, because it is okay to be sad, and there is a power in sadness, in revealing that part of yourself. I also narrate personal mental health struggles through the allusion of fairy tale elements.

I often draw to watch what appears, thinking about why a certain thing has appeared and what its implications are as it develops. For me drawing is a way to explore social constructions and the imposition of these on our perceptions and depictions in art and what these mean in my own works. For me, drawing is a perfect medium to playfully and often unconsciously make visible or deconstruct these roles or “norms” that have pressured me, as a woman, to project a certain image of sweetness and submission.