MAE WILSON
COMICS | ILLUSTRATION

Artist Statement
Fred Rogers once said that the simple and deep are much more important than the shallow and complex. Though I write for adults, I am attracted to the elegance found in a good children's book. As a cartoonist, I use drawing as a way of thinking and writing as a form of travel. I draw inspiration from fantasy, science fiction, history, philosophy, and places where urban systems encounter the rest of the ecosystem. I like reading things written by people whose life experience is different from mine, particularly when I disagree with them.
I keep a daily journal filled with observations, questions, and experiments to weave together into something new. I'm interested in the relationship between people and their beliefs, solutions that turn out to be more complicated problems in disguise, and hostorical art processes. Sometimes I just want to make someone laugh. Intuition and play are vital to my work; I have to listen to the needs of a project, inviting uncertainty in as a dance partner and collaborator.
The reasons I give for making art change every few years, but the impulse remains constant. Right now, I desperately want to understand the process of looking. I learned a long time ago that stories can be maps. A good one reads on many levels and even the artist doesn't know everything it contains. But we are tempted to pretend; to imagine that what we know is the extent of what there is, to treat a person as if they can be solved and dismissed like a math problem, to cut a multiverse down to fit a single answer. I observe myself because I want to know my blind spots and illusions , hoping I can move beyond them and see the world more clearly.