Hi, nice to meet you! I’m callmecoralwhite, a Canadian queer-feminist interdisciplinary artist currently focusing on illustration and animation. As a creative, I aim to design accessible art for a large, diverse population. In other words, I like to use the Internet to spread my art and ideas. Throughout my work, I play with the visual language of popular culture and openly borrow from the camp and cliché to queer them and create complex meanings: Doug Ford is combined with a Popeye villain from the early twentieth century to create a cute, political pin design; Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot deck is reimagined featuring a non-binary kitten; a “choose your fighter” meme is reconsidered through the mind of a kawaii Millennial.
I also inject humour into my art to explore critical issues or taboo topics, such as body positivity and living with a permanent illness/disability, and open up them up for discussion. To me, laughter is sometimes the best tool to talk about things that usually make me cry.
Lately, I’ve been working on writing and illustrating my first comic series, Dreamscape, which will be released later this summer. In the series, Selene is a lost Millennial with a chronic case of ennui and a terrible tendency to deal with none of her problems. That is, until she begins having strange and increasingly life-threatening dreams. Dreamscape is a story about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about nightmares.
I am also currently working to launch my own online art store and am excited to begin tabling at art events in the Fall. You can find my work on Witches Hit Back as a shirt design, forthcoming with Graphite Publications (Dreamscape, released online, Summer 2019), at Hamilton’s Kind Press artist sticker vending machine (as a participating artist of Sticker Series 2) or on my Instagram.
What inspires you?
I’m inspired by so many things it’s difficult to pin any one inspiration down, but I’ll try to name a few. I’m inspired by the idea of world-building: I love to imagine my own environments and try to envision every detail of them, from the textures of the world to its mood. Maybe it’s cliché, but I’m also inspired by the everyday events I see and the people I interact with. At some level, my art is always part autobiography.
Where do your ideas come from?
Honestly, I get a lot of my ideas from my dreams and nightmares. I have an incredibly active imagination and spend a lot of time in my own little worlds, so I often pull from there. If I’m stuck, I look to the work of people I admire and appropriate bits and pieces that connect to me.
What does you work aim to say about the world?
My work is a constantly developing practice of criticism and radical optimism. With my work, I’m never afraid to attack something I’m against (e.g. every idea by Doug Ford ever), but I’ve more recently been focusing on depicting places or people who successfully overcome the ideas I’m against. To me, this means making characters who are proudly queer, fat or different and showing communities that thrive on cooperation and intersectionality. I think that now, maybe more than ever, it’s important to protest the anger and destruction we see in media and war and governments with softness, confidence and an intention to make the world a better place.
Dream collaboration?
My dream collaboration would be with Rebecca Sugar, the creator of Steven Universe, because I’m constantly in awe of her character design, story writing and stylistic choices. I feel like if I spent even one hour with her, I’d learn so much!
Coral White (she/her, they/them) is the ghost who steals the spork from your expensive lunchbox set. You know, the one with all the cute little compartments in it. She completed an art degree from Western University without ever being sure what she learned, but was involved in several art shows such as Megaphone at the Satellite Project Space (2017) and was a writing/art contributor to Her Campus Western in 2018. She also successfully obtained a fairly enviable amount of student debt. Coral White is an optimistic nihilist who enjoys exploring the aesthetics of popular animation and inserting humour and politics into her art. She is unhappy about the state of the world and perhaps a bit bloated from the sandwich she ate earlier. If you want her to stop haunting you and stealing your luxury two-in-one utensils, pay her. Otherwise, follow her on Instagram and watch out for her forthcoming website, www.callmecoralwhite.com.