Cherise Clarke, Page 756: You Throw Like A Girl; text by Shere Hite, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, Knopf, 1987 (2008), charcoal, graphite and mixed media on paper [Gallery Gachet, Vancouver BC, Mar 7-29]

Cherise Clarke, Footnote (2009), charcoal, graphite and ink on paper [Gallery Gachet, Vancouver BC, Mar 7-29]

Cherise Clarke, Page 43: We Said We Had Experienced This For Ourselves; text by Catherine A. Mackinnon, "Consciousness Raising" in Issues in Feminism, Mayfield, 1998 (2008) charcoal, graphite, coloured pencil and vellum overlay [Gallery Gachet, Vancouver BC, Mar 7-29]

In a series of new drawings, Vancouver artist, feminist and activist Cherise Clarke visualizes passages of writing through symbolic illustrations. Searching for a device to convey her personal responses to historical and literary passages of text, she began working in charcoal, graphite and coloured pencil to produce scenes simulating three-dimensional “structures of feeling”. Each image stands in place of long tracts of text or hours of film, internet, and pop culture, and is similarly titled as if it is a page taken from an unbound volume of literature.

In FEMINSTRATION: You Draw Like A Girl, Clarke takes the term “herstory” to heart by illustrating her experiences and emotional impressions as protagonist in her own life story. Using simple tools of pencil and paper, she seeks to convey, in an accessible, relevant, and deeply personal manner, the kinds of internal landscapes that cerebral texts evoke.

Cherise Clarke is a largely self-taught multidisciplinary artist who identifies herself as an “outsider.” A large focus of her creative energy over the past four years has been the collective building of a co-operative art-and-health community through the artist-run centre Gallery Gachet in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She trained in Theatre at the University of British Columbia and as a professional actor has appeared at Vancouver venues such as Performance Works, the Firehall Arts Centre and the Arts Club Theatre, Vancouver.

www.gachet.org

Mia Johnson