Stasia Burrington

Visual Art – Seattle

Stasia Burrington lives in Bellevue, WA with her partner and two cats, and since 2010 is a full-time freelance illustrator, sequential and fine artist. She works both digitally and traditionally - in pencil, ink, paint and fabric, drawing strange little girls and intimate portraits of self-marked and tattooed people. She is the co-author/illustrator of the Virgin Project graphic novel series, wherein she and her partner interviewed over 400 people on how they lost their virginity, and then illustrated them anonymously through comics. Stasia is obsessed with contemporary anthropology, storytelling, subversion, and things that are both beautiful and repulsive. Also, bugs. She LOVES bugs, and has been known to pin their little cadavers onto her drawings. Her personal work veers in two directions: the cutesy, children’s book-like illustrations, and the more ‘grown up’ delicate pencil-and-ink figure drawings, often covered in cotton flowers cut from quilt fabric. She now spends hours with her scissors and her piles of fabric, repurposing the patterns to become both backgrounds and body coverings for her subjects. The patterns of petals and leaves join bodies together, and fuzzy-up the distinction between person and background. She is interested in self-definition and self-distinction from environment – we usually use skin to make this delineation, or our clothes, or our homes – how we separate ourselves from others, or how we choose to include others. In opening or marking the skin we’re invited to redefine where “I” end, and “you” begin. Online Gallery: http://www.stasiab.carbonmade.com