Artist statement:
A SEVERE MERCY was cut and pasted out of two years’ worth of bad dreams – nightmares (both real and imagined) that I couldn’t speak out loud... but also couldn’t forget. This lucid recollection is not an arraignment... rather, it’s a documentation of where I was and where I’m going.
Most (if not all) characters, costumes, and scenes were excised from their tidy, designed homes and later rehoused in new roadmap-less, textbook-less arrangements – without bearing and without clues of where they were… emblematic, perhaps, of the deeper struggle this series aims to capture.
In fact, it is only when these seemingly disjointed vignettes are laid side by side does the larger narrative become decisively clear: a female monarch, a baby caterpillar, an ominous figure, and the Surgeon. Throughout this 10 panel saga we see a drama of freedom and bondage, surgery and setback, attempts to re-ensnare swallowed up by fortresses of restoration.
A series quiet in its dispensation of the truth had to be conducted in the quiet in-between moments. A Nat Geo here and there while Thomas and Percy clacked away nearby on wooden tracks. An arranging and rearranging of paper into the wee hours while Baby Caterpillar slept. A furious hand wringing of which burdened memories to share.
As much as possible, I tried to work with found images, even if it meant taking another trip to the “Friends of the Library” a town over – scouring the same ten shelves to check out with my 3-for-a- dollar treasure chest finds. Sometimes, I’d buy a whole book just for one picture.
On its materiality…yes. No other method would suffice. Collage, in all its uncomfortability and un-smoothness was the only way to capture these thoughts so seamlessly. I found language in collage for expressions I could have otherwise never arrived at. But maybe that how the Spirit works.
Some things were just easier to work out with scissors, paper and glue, where words failed. Like Pi Patel’s Richard Parker...the abominable wrapped up in allegory. Except I was the orangutang/mom. Except I wasn’t, because I survived. We survived. Survivors and not victims – “victim” – that is the DA’s term, not mine. We survived not because of strength, but because we were rescued, rescued because of A Severe Mercy.
~Sophie Cook, October 9, 2025
