| My recent work deals with themes such as sexual perversion, as well as occult and Thelemic imagery and symbolism. There are also a lot of underlying themes of isolation, sorrow, and mangled senses of self. I try to convey grief and introspective mourning in poignant and relatable ways. Most of my work is narrative in some sense, and a lot of it is somewhat cryptically autobiographical. As a printmaker, I inevitably focus a lot on mark making, which informs my style that tends to have a lot of emphasis on line. I work primarily in book format, and am interested in finishing a few larger, more ambitious book projects, and bringing more text into my visual work than I have in the past. The fodder for my work is drawn almost entirely from my overly analytical and introspective tendencies. |  |
Heather Benjamin
My recent work deals with themes such as sexual perversion, as well as occult and Thelemic imagery and symbolism. There are also a lot of underlying themes of isolation, sorrow, and mangled senses of self. I try to convey grief and introspective mourning in poignant and relatable ways. Most of my work is narrative in some sense, and a lot of it is somewhat cryptically autobiographical.
As a printmaker, I inevitably focus a lot on mark making, which informs my style that tends to have a lot of emphasis on line. I work primarily in book format, and am interested in finishing a few larger, more ambitious book projects, and bringing more text into my visual work than I have in the past.
The fodder for my work is drawn almost entirely from my overly analytical and introspective tendencies. I recently have been thinking that a lot of what I draw comes from the same place in my head, where all the effed-up and flat-out weird things are brewing, mutating, and bubbling up and out, things that I think to myself but never really want to say out loud for fear of total exclusion.
I’ve drawn my more concrete influences mainly from comic books over the past few years. I’m really into Wimmen’s Comix and a lot of other anthologies put out by Last Gasp in the 70s and 80s, and in general most of the work that came out of the underground comix movement in the 60s. I find C.F.’s work really beautiful and inspiring, and I’m continually turned on by Raymond Pettibon’s work.
I’m informed by ideas that inform primitivism and misanthropy, and by the folk/black metal movement in the Pacific Northwest, which has inspired my artwork and personal ideals a lot over the past few years.
