Drawn to the Story

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I never experienced an identity crisis until the months after my father died.  His death was sudden and piercing.  It upset the natural balance of my personal history and it left me full of unending doubt. My figurative drawings began to blur and erode as my inner emotional life spread itself across the paper in a performative gesture of mourning and loss.

Slowly, I started to pluck at the gnawing uncertainty in my life and pull out meaning to create a different story: one wrought with paradoxes and clumsiness. Celtic myths, slapstick humor and Samuel Beckett became the beacons of light that shifted my perspective and made room for the grief to evolve into a new tale.

And so these characters were born. They belong to a world that is not ours, but has the flavor of somewhere familiar. A tent, a child’s playtime sculpture, synthetic wigs, and exaggerated clothing cover their frames and become their bodies.

Boy, girl, man, bird, idiot, hero: we are all one in this story. I’ll trim your mustache if you pluck my eyebrows and we will all clamber about on the stage of adulthood.  

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Alice Gibney