I write and draw comics.

Using sepia and kraft paper, brown and white pencil, white and turquoise gouache, I try to recreate the feel of vintage photographs, found letters and archival documents. I am particularly interested in the domesticity of motherhood and marriage, and that’s why hands feature heavily in my drawings: sewing, podding peas, fighting in a boxing game, smoking or gesturing while singing. Drawings take more space than writing, with a big play on negative space. As a film lover, my compositions are very often cinematic, with play on scale, close-ups, or a page that takes you on a drive through a city, almost shot-by-shot. The most freeing process in the last few years has been to ditch ‘real life’ colours in favour of a play on tone and layers. Historical paintings, and my own take on fairy tales, are very present too. 

I will often start by roughly drafting the dialogue, and then prepare the background with white gouache or tape: it could be a silhouette roughly laid out in paint, or an entire panel which is key to the narrative on this page. White backgrounds and negative spaces serve to highlight the important protagonist or, on the other hand, who or what is missing: a family member or a building that is gone. I then, if necessary, draw a more detailed background, in pencil. Sometimes, I will go over the background again with gouache or an acrylic pen, to make space for a silhouette. I’ll then draw the character. The layers, dilution of the gouache, thickness of the coloured pencil all serve my narrative. So does the negative space, by creating either heaviness or openness. I add or withdraw elements between which I make links: the hands of my grandmother on a photo, a painting of the Virgin Mary at the museum where I work, a vintage map of the Mediterranean and how the road resembles the veins on the fingers. 

Coloured pencils are very forgiving: I used to like the watercolour variety, but they tend to be too soft, and I like them sharp and light-touch. I enjoy using children’s materials because they have vivid colours, are cheap and so robust I’ve owned some of my chunky pencils for 25 years. Because of my limited colour palette, I can play around with a range of materials without it looking too disharmonious. 

I think of my comics as a repository of stories confided in me by the women in my family, taxi drivers, or neighbours for example. Since becoming a parent I have developed an urge to tell these stories, prompted by both the need to model doing what one loves (in my case, making comics) and a fear of hereditary dementia in my family. This is why the recurring themes are memory/ies - with its inevitable flaws - Herstory, migration, legitimacy, loss and grief, gender, music, with visual art as a thread. I hope people can relate to these themes and perhaps, along the way, laugh a little, and cry a little.