Shary Boyle isn’t a comics artist, though comics readers are happy to claim her as one of their own. I first started paying attention to her work when it appeared in the 2006 volume of Kramers Ergot, a comics anthology that scrambles divisions between comics and other visual arts. Boyle’s airy, neon-coloured drawings of uncanny creatures strewn amid grasses and drizzled with bodily fluids numbered among the strongest inclusions in those pages—which, when it comes to the generally high quality of work in Kramers, is saying something.
Some more of those drawings turn up in the new Boyle retrospective, Otherworld Uprising, where we learn that they’re part of her “Porcelain Fantasy” series, mock-ups for impossible-to-realise porcelain figurines, and we begin to understand why they’re so easily acceptable as part of a continuum of cartooning. Fantastic and figurative, depicted in line art conducted in pencil or ink, Boyle’s drawings suggest narrative possibilities and freeze motion in ways particular to comics. But unlike similar near-cartooning by BC resident Julie Morstad or Québec native Geneviève Castrée, both of whom share Boyle’s concern with the fantastic and feminine and grotesque, Boyle’s works remain defiant and unruly, however suggestive. They defy fantasy, for one, and refuse to coalesce into any discernible “world,” instead remaining disarmingly ungoverned. For another, they defy figuration, preferring rather to cut the figure apart, obscure it, distort it, or at most make it more of a figurine than a figure. Most of all, though, they defy narrative, confronting us simply with the unsettling facts of existence—this woman has no head, or the universe has exploded, or yes this creature is looking at you—without explaining them away, without providing them with a comforting sense of before and after.
Otherworld Uprising also gives us very little narrative. The book looks back over ten years of Boyle’s career, during which time she has worked with Sculpey, with overhead projection (sadly overlooked here), with oil and gouache and pencil and ink, and perhaps most remarkably with porcelain. But these works appear out of chronological order, which divorces them from any sense of artistic progression and makes each seem even more singular and self-justifying.
Engaging with Boyle’s art can often mean nothing more than reveling in her outsized, disconcerting themes and motifs—cuts, stigmata, orifices, urine, excretions, obtrusions, insertions, distortions, deformities, disembodiment, disasters, floods, explosions, eruptions, the feminine as consumed or consumptive or consuming, the vegetable and the animal and the aquatic and the astronomical and the whole bloody vast entire cosmos. But to anatomise Boyle’s work is the barest of its pleasures.
To really look at what she does is to be seduced by her craft before we can be repulsed by what she crafts, a manoeuvre which Lorissa Sengara calls “the collusion between the beautiful and the confrontational,” and which undergirds Boyle’s sense of what femininity comprises. Those effervescent and colourful streams spouting out all over the image seem positively celebratory, until we realise they’re gushing from the figure’s wrists and chest and pudenda and, god, even from her eyes. Or, that pink and yellow and orange mass of colour looks marvellous, spectacular, until we see it’s lava about to engulf the tiny naked couple in the corner.
Likewise, the effortless skill with which the lacework floats about her figurines at first distracts us from just how much of it there is—when we realise there might, in fact, be rather too much, we begin to see the outcroppings of lace from the figure’s face and hands, or the talons that protrude from below this one’s decorative hem, or that one’s backwards head or missing hands. It’s as though we take so much pleasure in the surface of the work that we directly cause the disruptions and disasters which it glosses over.
The essays accompanying these artworks—an introduction by Ben Portis, a piece on the porcelain work by Josée Drouin-Brisebois, and a profile-cum-meditation by Sheila Heti—often prove instructive, if a bit conspicuous. Drouin-Brisebois gives a brief history of the theory and practice of porcelain-making in her extensive look at Boyle’s figurines, photographs of which form the centrepiece of the book (and rightfully so). She then makes an academic concession to laymen like me, and offers useful thoughts on exactly how Boyle manipulates traditions and assumptions in order to unsettle us, before the essay devolves into zeitgeist-chasing.
Portis’s overview is concise but detailed, getting commonplaces about “storybooks” and “realms” and Boyle’s “legend-like” imagery out of the way early on, making way for observations that seem at least poetically true: “[Her characters] wear the transmogrifications of unspoken experience,” he writes. Even Heti’s contribution, which hinges on a troublesome understanding of iconoclasm and verges on the artificial and precious in ways that Boyle’s art sidesteps (it ends, for instance, “Where have they all gone, the rusty cars of our heart?”), manages to offer insight. In it, Boyle tells the author, “We have every kind [of] picture of life as we know it at this second. I really feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical and beautiful and fantastic about being human.”
The other articles quote Boyle, too, but it’s almost disconcerting to read her lay out her project so baldly. The artist is almost too articulate—about fantasy, about how feminity can be tied up in craft, about arts-grant-application buzzwords like subversion and appropriation—which would rob her work of some of its mystery if it wasn’t so accomplished. In the end, her art doesn’t appropriate traditions so much as it insolently aligns itself with them; doesn’t create fantasy worlds so much as it draws disarming, enticing tangents to our own.
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