Feminstration: You Draw Like A Girl – Feminist Illustrations by Cherise Clarke

From one of many front lines of new wave feminism, this series of drawn compositions by Vancouver artist Cherise Clarke takes the term ‘herstory’ to heart by illustrating her experiences and emotional impressions as protagonist in her own life story.

In this series of drawings, Clarke has limited herself to the austere yet highly expressive media of charcoal and graphite.  Each piece is titled along with an out-of-synch page number, as though unbound and pulled from an incomprehensibly vast book of which we are entitled only to tantalizing glimpses.  She illustrates tracts of text that do not at first glance seem to lend themselves to imagery; for example: “The 1970’s feminist legacy (according to feminist theatre critic Elaine Aston) may reflect a world that has become a whole lot darker and more violent; a world where feminist agency is lost to the individualist, materialist principles of late 20th century capitalism…”

Using simple, earth-based tools of pencil and paper, she tries to convey the internal landscape that such seemingly cerebral text sets up, in an accessible, relevant, and deeply personal manner.  Hers is a refined and surrealist style which allows her to weave together emotionally charged and detailed symbolic imagery to convey, and possibly stand in place of, long tracts of text or hours of film, internet, and pop culture.  In this sense each picture is ?worth a thousand words?.

Informing her process has been the tradition of stained glass windows in churches historically used to pictorially convey biblical parables to people before the widespread use of the printing press made the masses literate.  “I encounter so many important ideas about feminism and life, usually in print, and wish I could somehow convey them to others in one mind-meld moment, with the backing of personal experience and feeling, and that of so many women around me.  I began to experiment with the idea of trying to do this through imagery (could adult, complex, even contradictory ideas and life experiences be distilled into image form, highlighted by text and thus simplified)”

For her, it is both a participation in the recent rise of the ‘craft’ of illustration to its rightful place as fine art, and a return to the dominant media of childhood and adolescence before she explored painting: a symbolic return to roots in order to ask fundamental questions.

Clarke is a largely self-taught multidisciplinary artist and identifies as Outsider. A large focus of her creative energy over the past four years has been the collective building of a cooperative art-and-health community through the Gallery Gachet, in Vancouver’s Downtown Easts Eastside.  She trained in Theatre at the University of British Columbia and also practices professionally as a stage actor, in such venues as Performance Works, the Firehall Arts Centre, and with Vancouver’s Arts Club in a recent acclaimed production of Tennessee William’s “The Glass Menagerie.”