When she was 18, Heather Benjamin turned to illustration as a form of catharsis following an intense breakup. After furiously drawing for many many months, creating deeply personal illustrations chronicling the aftershock of love lost, Benjamin put out her first zine – a collection of minimal black and white drawings full of raw emotion and sex.
From there her creative output snowballed, rolling into a rich collection of zines, books, and larger format illustrations and paintings.
When we stumbled across Heather Benjamin’s work we were blown away: dark, erotic, occultist drawings that explore a primal side of female identity. Check out a selection of her works below.
Her work deals with themes of darkness, absurdity and erotica with a healthy dose of the occult. We stumbled across Heather’s work on an excellent piece on Creators where she explains her she explains her choice of subject matter:
“My reasoning for depicting women the way I do, across a broad spectrum of feelings and states of being and levels of self-acceptance or sexiness or abjection, always has to do with the way I personally feel in my own skin and my own mind as a woman.”
“Even though my feelings towards myself all fluctuate on a daily basis, overall I constantly feel a push and pull between feeling beautiful and feeling ugly, loving myself and hating myself, feeling at peace and feeling anxious, feeling traumatized and feeling enlightened, feeling sexy and zen and feeling like a nasty animal—sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. So my work is inherently about all these juxtapositions, trying to reckon with them.”
We definitely recommend giving the article a read. Check out a selection of her works below, which you can also buy here.
[via Creators]
