Interview with Heather Benjamin
When did you start making art and what inspired you to do so?
It was what I did all the time as a child too, since my earliest memories. It was always something that felt natural and that I loved doing. I guess the point where I really started becoming obsessed with it in the way that I am now was in probably like fourth grade or so when I started drawing Sailor Moon fan art literally 24/7. That is kind of the pace and feeling I’ve kept up since then.
At what point did you decide that art would be your main outlet/career? When I was in high school, I wasn’t even really sure if I wanted to go to art school or not. I applied to plenty of liberal arts schools with the intention of potentially taking on a different major, not necessarily visual art. But even within that confusion I never doubted that it would be something that would be a huge part of my life forever, that I would have a practice that took a lot of my energy. But then I did end up going to art school, and around that time (2008/2009) when I was a freshman at RISD, I started developing the style I work in now and simultaneously getting some good feedback about it. So that encouraged me to keep moving forward with pursuing art as a career, because it seemed like there was a chance that it might actually
“work”—whatever that means.
Before you started making these illustrations you created and put out a lot of different zines and such. Can you talk a bit about that?
I still make zines, but it’s true that when I was a bit younger I put them out more frequently, and a lot of the works I made in general were intended from their genesis to be displayed in book or zine format. I was really influenced by DIY zine and comics culture as a teenager—I was incredibly inspired by the idea of DIY self-publishing and bookmaking as an inexpensive and self-sufficient way to get your work out into the world. Through photocopying my drawings, which is so cheap and easy to do, I was able to make tons of copies of zines of my drawings and be able to leave them places where I thought people who would be interested in my work might find them, give them to people I was inspired by, etc. I think that made a huge difference in creating high visibility for my work and my style at a young age. I think self-publishing is so amazing for that reason, and I will always have so much love for zines. I’ll always make them. They feel like my roots.
Do your illustrations satiate a different need than your zines?
I would say it does satiate a different need— I like not feeling restricted to only working in book format. Even though I have so much love for it, certain things can’t be reproduced up to my standards and with my means of production—whether that’s because there are too many colors, or the piece is too large, etc.—so I like to feel free to make whatever kind of work I want to make, whether it’s going to exist within a book or not. I might not feel as restricted about working in zine format if I wanted to do digital printing— I guess if I did that, I could just scan and print whatever works I wanted—but I feel very strongly about making my zines on
a photocopier, so that affects what kind of work I can print and how it will translate.
Over the last few years, I have become more interested in experimenting with size and color and medium more than I used to when I primarily made zines and smaller drawings, so having these two kind of parallel tracks in my practice allows me to do both. I feel like working them at the same time, often one will inform the other. While I’m working on the smaller scale, slightly more “restricted” works for a zine, I’ll come up with ideas that I want to expand on in a looser and more free way with the standalone pieces, and vice versa.
How much do you feel your emotions influence your art?
There literally wouldn’t be any work without them. My work is fully based on my emotions. It’s incredibly personal and autobiographical, and the phases of my work that I move through over time are directly connected to what is going on in my life and how I’m processing it.
Can you go into detail about your many vignettes of this man and woman making out?
The couple is appropriated from the classic romance comics of the 1950s, of which I have a pretty extensive collection. In those comics, there is this recurring image of a somber woman, shedding a tear or staring out into space with her head in her hands, daydreaming about her lost love or the one that got away or whatever, with this couple locked in a passionate embrace somewhere in the background or in her field of vision. I got really obsessed with that equation, lonely girl + distant romantic man and woman, and started playing with it in my own work. I related to it in a literal sense, like that actual literal interpretation was meaningful to me, but I was also interested in playing with it…I got obsessed with the idea of using that visual cue symbolically as a sort of avatar for a lot of emotions I was working through and trying to excavate in my work—jealousy, intimacy, romance, passion and obsession, nostalgia.
What are you ultimately trying to say with your work? What would you like the viewers to take away from it?
My hope is that a viewer can find threads of reliability in my narratives; that through expressing and rendering my own inner dialogue, I’m touching on things that feel familiar to others. A lot of my work is about trauma and abject experiences, and I’m trying to create beauty out of those emotions. That process is incredibly cathartic for me. It’s how I work through my baggage, and ultimately that is why I make my work—I love doing it, and I also need to do it. But the best feeling is when people tell me that something in my work made them feel like I captured a feeling or emotion they couldn’t put their finger on, or turned something that feels difficult for them into something beautiful. Where I have created an environment where the yin and the yang exist simultaneously and it feels like it all makes sense despite it being difficult. Do you consider yourself a feminist? If so please explain.
Yes, I realize I personally don’t really feel a need to stray away from that word. I care deeply about women’s equality and rights, for ALL kinds of women.
AMEN! What is your favorite color combination currently?
I always love two slightly different variations of the same color—so like, a cool periwinkley lavender and a warmer pinkish lavender.
Please name some current influences. Rossetti, Hilma Af Klint, Henry Darger (always, since I was young).
What can we expect to see from you in the near future?
Right now, I’m working toward two solo exhibitions in the first half of next year, in LA and Tokyo, as well as curating my second group show, and finishing up a residency at Juxtapoz Projects in Jersey City, which will culminate in a two-person show with my fellow artist in residence Justin Cole Smith this January.
To see more of Benjamin’s work you can go here: heatherbenjamin.bigcartel.com
@heatherbenjamin_