SIGNS
A graphic novel
About
SIGNS is a graphic novel in three volumes about drawing oneself free from one’s own story.
In the first volume, we follow a girl growing up alone with a mother who is dependent on alcohol and lives with paranoid schizophrenia. Home is unpredictable, and the girl develops her own ways of surviving. She plays, draws, seeks refuge in nature, and moves in and out of an imaginary world inhabited, among others, by a bird and a Barbie doll. At the same time, she is constantly trying to read her mother and make sense of the world around her.
The girl tells no one about what she experiences. She is afraid that her own visions and fantasies mean that she is going mad, just like her mother. Instead, she begins to draw.
In the second volume, the girl has become a young woman. When she is twenty-five, her mother dies. She gives herself over to what she has always wanted: art. She moves to London and is accepted into one of the world’s leading art schools. But the world she hopes will set her free becomes another place in which to lose herself. She develops an alcohol addiction of her own and gradually loses her footing, both within herself and within the art world.
In the third volume, she gets sober. It marks the beginning of a long journey out of the darkness and towards a different life. Eventually, she finds a home in the countryside, far from the art world in which she once fought to be seen. But the images are still there. The visions are still there. And the art is still there. The question is no longer how she can escape her story, but how she can live with it – and create from it.
Driven by need
SIGNS is a literary work told through drawing and words. The tension between the two is part of the story itself. The drawings do not illustrate the text; they are another language: the place where the child can express what she does not yet have words for. In this way, the work explores whether, through images and storytelling, we can draw ourselves free from our own history.
At the same time, I want to create a work that can be read by both young people and adults, and that can offer a mirror to children and young people living with alcohol addiction or mental illness in the family: a story showing that what happens behind the closed doors of a home does not have to remain a secret, and that another life is possible.