An interview with Sarah Gordon
Inspirational artist and printmaker.
Originally published 8 February 2020.
This week I’ve interviewed easily one of the most inspirational artists that I have the privilege of knowing, Sarah Gordon, whose macabre and unsettling comics and illustrations make the world a better place.
A comic creator, artist and printmaker, Sarah’s work has been described as “disturbing” by The Guardian and she has a talent that cannot be repressed. Sarah contributed an image to the HERETICS folk-horror exhibition that I co-hosted in Leeds and I still dream of finding a way to collaborate with her more fully.
1/ What were your hopes when you chose to pursue the life of an artist and have your motivations changed over time?
Does fear of death count? I keep a memento mori as the wallpaper for my phone and my laptop. I find it incredibly motivational.
I came to my creative career with very few notions of where exactly I wanted to end up. My basic hopes were to not live in a bin, and to not have to continue working in a bar or as a reprographics assistant in an office as I had done before/during college. I can't remember a time when I wasn't creating things, it's a part of life like eating or sleeping, and I didn't want that to change when I hit the adult world. Life's short, and sitting in an office, bored out of my skull for eight hours a day didn't appeal to my teenage self.
“My latest project involved me burning a seven-foot wicker owl effigy full of letters from my readers, and making ink from its ashes to turn into a book of horror stories.” – Sarah Gordon
Early in everyone's career, I think there can be a lot of scrabbling around for survival, so your creative motivations can often get caught up in that. At the start, a lot of the work I was doing was all about either paying the bills (so, work for hire and almost always me realising someone else's vision), or I was trying to find my voice underneath everything I had been told about what art is, what it should look like, who should be making it, and why it should even exist. It can take a while to sift through all that debris, and you sort of find the purpose of the work by making the work.
These days it's much more about making things I'd like to see in the world. I like it when art provides a certain provocative catharsis for its audience, so I try my best to provide that. My latest project involved me burning a seven-foot wicker owl effigy full of letters from my readers, and making ink from its ashes to turn into a book of horror stories. I would have been far too scared about where my next month's rent money was coming from when I was a recent graduate. I still get scared about bills from time to time, like lots of people, but the need to bring a bit of weird beauty to the world has, it seems, won this particular fight.
2/ Who or what has been the greatest source of inspiration across your career?
Inspiration comes from all over. As far as I can tell its living life and paying attention to what happens that keeps you fresh.
If I'm feeling a bit stuck with work I am prone to making playlists, as I find music can trigger ideas and generate a bit of confluence of thought. Historically that has meant listening to a truly uncouth amount of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, or the experimental weird stuff they play on Radio 3 near midnight.
3/ What have you learned in the process of making comics or working as an illustrator that you wish you had understood at the beginning of your career?
That you don't have to do things the way other people are doing them. It's not a bad thing if your work isn't on-trend or the definition of a comic book. Convention is fine, but it's okay (more than okay) if you want to step out of the designated boundaries of your medium and muck about a bit. Or a lot.
4/ If you woke tomorrow and were no longer constrained by time, budgets or even skills that you haven’t learned yet, what would you make?
I'd send a new moon into orbit to sit alongside the regular moon. It would be painted in Black 3.0 (Stuart Semple's perfect black pigment that absorbs 99% of light), and impossible to photograph or observe from Earth. But it would be up there, looming.
Failing that I have a couple of solid book ideas in the works. The next big narrative step for me will be to transition from the short story form into long-form or serialised story-telling. I'm looking forward to it!