joy

As a child, you wrote a book entitled Attack of the Killer Barbie, so you were obviously both artistic and political at an early age. What first inspired you to become an artist?
My dad was a creative inspiration when I was a kid. He worked as a graphic designer but did all sorts of woodworking, sewed me dresses, built a strip cedar canoe, rebuilt a TR3—his resourcefulness and do-it-yourself attitude really rubbed off on me. Also, I was always obsessed with materials and used to collect scraps of everything. I loved to draw and make elaborate seasonal displays in my room. I also used to read a lot of craft books. The Attack of the Killer Barbie book, I wrote in the fourth grade and it was the first thing I made that received attention, outside my family. As a little tomboy it was an obvious topic to address in an illustrated novella; nobody told me at the time that it was a feminist statement. Regardless, the whole experience really encouraged me to be clever in my work.

What some of the political and nonprofit endeavors that you have used your artistic gifts to promote.
While attending design school at Concordia University in Montreal, there was some focus on being a conscious designer, which I think was some kind of encouragement for us students to not all sell out in the future. It was sort of this abstract idea for a lot of people, like if you weren’t doing ads for an eco-friendly product, there were no other options. It was through my political organizing work and not really through my design education that I learned how design is a crucial element of any political movement, just as it is crucial to the success of a product in the marketplace. When I’m doing organizing work with a group of people, it’s really exciting to be able to share these skills. For example, when I moved to Montreal I started learning about the Black Panthers, political prisoners, prisoner justice issues and antiracism. This was interesting because I was basically learning about the U.S. “(in)justice” system from Canada. I hooked up with a group of people at certaindays.org and designed calendars to support the struggles of political prisoners. I also did design work and skills sharing at an incredible organization in Montreal called the Immigrant Workers Center, and I’ve worked with a transsexual and transgender health organization called ASTT(e)Q. We put out a series of pamphlets on trans health, where the whole theme was trans superheroes, so the art was very comic book-esque. Lately I’ve been doing lots of odds and ends design for a LGBTTIQ youth advocacy and support center called Project 10 at myspace.com/p10montreal, and I’m also on their Board of Directors.
-Emily Storey