I’m Bug, an interdisciplinary visual artist, illustrator and tattooist. I bring myself with the perspectives of being a mad, disabled, queer and trans person based on Coast Salish territories colonially Vancouver, BC.
Feeling the world visually, art is an intrinsic focus. I am drawn deeply to the complexity of detail and the expansiveness of imagination. I understand art as a way of relation free of law or limit. I see my role as an artist as constructing hope, while understanding dreaming and inspiration as living components of collective livelihood.
Drawing is core to my practice, with a primary focus on illustration and empathetic tattooing. I make art with pen and paper, sketchbooks and piles of multimedia. I do digital art, painting, printmaking and writing. Sketching, drawing and making as a method of feeling and perceiving. I make elaborate fineline drawings, watercolour and acrylic paintings, comics, poetry, essays and zines. Visual art being integral to me as it is how I am in service to myself and others.
My creativity has seen me through trauma, addiction and micro-lifetimes. It grew up with me through punk scenes and collective houses. It is rooted in the communities that built me and is for everyone who recognizes themself in it. I see personal history and self documentation as keys to empowerment and know survival as being rooted in story. My own is a rejection of sanity and status-quo reality and a navigation of magic, queerness and interconnection. It honours self, reality and time as fluid and non-linear and envisions gay dreamworld futures made tangible through freak art and magical realism.