Craestor
Born in 1989 in Höxter, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Craestor makes drawings by hand with ink on paper and edits them digitally. The artist has a strong appreciation for black and white aesthetics, but also utilizes colour when it feels right for the illustration. Craestor’s work has a queer-feminist and anti-capitalist approach. She wants to share a message with her drawings and creates humorous, punchy illustrations, caricatures, and mini comics. The artist’s preferred motifs are representations of non-cis, male bodies, diverse sexualities, and genders. Highlighting feminist issues and making use of pop cultural references are substantial aspects of Craestor’s art.
She is an illustrator, cartoonist, comic researcher and anthropologist, currently working on a project about autobiographical mental health comics made by women. The artist aims to explore and analyse the intersections of gender, art, and mental health in her academic and artistic work.
Who is your shero and why?
“Nevertheless, she persisted” perfectly captures the remarkable life and career of my shero, the Country singer Dolly Parton. I admire the ways in which she, entangled in a sexist classist system, always kept her famous sense of humor and her bright self-reflexivity, unapologetically being true to herself no matter what.
Coming from a poor, rural background, to which she herself refers as “hillbilly”, Dolly Parton has known the struggles of being a poor woman trying to make a life of her own. Dolly Parton dealt with resentment as a result of her colourful, revealing clothes, wigs, and cosmetic surgery. Parton also dealt with unwanted advanced all too common for the working-class woman. However, she never let these difficulties get the best of her, and remained unwavering, determinedly going her own way. In her creative work, she has processed and called out the injustice of a capitalist work system and patriarchal oppression, in a way that speaks to a broad audience (including non college-educated individuals).
How does the work you are presenting exemplify the theme of ‘sheroes’?
(The piece) Dolly Parton represents a woman from the working class who lives and shares her own kind of resistance. This resistance is based on experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Dolly’s defiant but positive attitude towards the judgement she has so often received is a good example of someone who understands what it means to have to fight to be taken seriously.
