https://www.cartoonkate.co.uk/
Alan Dearling shares the vibes!
‘Wow, what a show!!!’ Last night, ‘Cartoon Kate’ Evans created a stunning, funny, informative and intellectually and politically challenging presentation at St Mary’s Church as part of the Todmorden Book Festival. A substantial crowd of people came to see her show – part of her tour to support her new book, ‘Patchwork’, which is a cartoon biography of Jane Austen. It offered a vivid portrayal of history – of the life of women at the time of Jane Austen set against the backdrop of the Empire and colonialism.
And on display was Kate’s thread-painted mural patchwork featuring many scenes from the book, echoing Jane Austen’s quilt creations. An epic show. And totally appropriate for the town of Todmorden which lies on the Lancashire/Yorkshire boundary, linked together by the history of textiles, cotton mills and the ghosts of the slave trade and child labour.
It was personally, absolutely great to meet up with Kate again – we had worked together on her book ‘Copse: a cartoon history of tree protesting’ in the 1990s, when Kate was often living in a tree house and was one of the eco-warriors on the road protests. And like myself, very involved with the fight against the Criminal Justice Act.
During the show, Kate explained her detailed research methods for her book. She read all the available letters from Jane Austen, read all her books and ended up with over 500 pages of her own research notes. She told us that as a graphic novelist she ‘deconstructs’ the themes running through her subject’s life. Jane’s life was like a ‘swallow trapped in a cage’… ‘Privileged, but she wasn’t free.’
Kate explained that she was keen through the cloths she has sewn together, to tell the tangential story of fabrics, which link together Jane Austen’s passions with the growth and development of the industrial mills, trade links, threads in a story that degraded, enslaved with children working in mills left with twisted bodies, and the male-dominated traders literally leaving people in parts of Africa ‘disintegrated’. Kate even displayed examples of ‘slave cloth’, homespun rough blue-hued cottons. And in Jane Austen’s novels there were many creations displaying a mix of satire, romance, passion and English Regency moralities. Her heroines and heroes are located in the social, economic and political milieu of Regency life, including, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’.
Kate Evans is humorous, she’s ironic, and Kate packs a considerable emotional weight and an activist’s punch. She is irreverent, independent-minded, acerbic even. She is also a considerable researcher, a pedant with an academic’s attention to detail. ‘Patchwork’ contains an enormous amount of notes, cross-referencing, minutiae, but it’s fun, beguiling too. Kate is a feminist cartoonist and writer for the modern age.
Cartoon Kate invited attendees to her ‘Patchwork’ Jane Austen show in Tod to dress ‘Regency’! I think it meant being a tad monochrome…see what you think of my little effort…
As a bit of background, Kate Evans was born in Montreal, Canada, and raised in Surrey, England. In her show, she explained that she spent a lot of her childhood at her grandmother’s house in the picturesque, Biddestone in Wiltshire (on left in the pic), and used the upstairs window as a model image for Jane Austen’s backdrop for her sewing.
Kate was a student of English literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton where she became involved in political activism and protest in opposition to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. It was during this time that I met Kate. Like me, Kate contributed to the Traveller/Protest/ DIY publications of that time, such as SchNEWS, Squall and Festival Times. From 1995 to 1998, she dedicated herself to environmental activism, providing cartoon reportage for The Guardian newspaper. In 1998, Kate wrote, illustrated and published Copse: the Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting. I think that so far Kate has created nine graphic novels including ‘Bump’, a guide to motherhood, and ‘Threads from the Refugee Crisis’ featuring the infamous Calais Jungle camp.
Npr.org review: While some might be bothered by a biography that regularly, and proudly, takes liberties with facts and chronology, such artistry is the heart and strength of Evans’ delightful and illuminating ‘Patchwork’. This energetic book, brimming with bright pages of illustration paired with often bounteous text, is premised on a piecing together – hence, the crafting metaphor of its title – of the threadbare record of its subject’s short but productive life. The book will be highly satisfying to anyone craving more companionship with Jane Austen, both her life and her work.
Yiskah Jessica S Kemp:
It’s a wonderful book though it was gorgeous when you showed me also you walk that tight rope between insanity and genius… congratulations lovely lady… it’s a work of beauty and inspired genius.
In the Q&A at the end of her show, Kate Evans told the audience that she is potentially working on two new graphic biographies. Next time featuring the life and times of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Here’s her Facebook little video about creating, ‘Patchwork’: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1381690290056294
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