I’m Bug, an interdisciplinary visual artist, illustrator and tattooist. I bring myself with the perspectives of being a white, mixed, 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. Grounding in illustration and empathetic tattoo work, my art expands to the use of comics, digital mediums, painting, printmaking, writing, poetry and zines. Enamoured with the process of translating perspective through art, I create with ever present narrative, world building, portal making and the all consuming need to be understood.
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.