About the Work

“The Strip” is an excerpt from a larger comic documentary project. I’ve been drawn to graphic journalism over the past few years because of its ability to ask us to really think about how we see. Because graphic journalists often reconstruct the news, as a discipline, it often asks the creator to simultaneously stretch the capacity to empathize and question the boundaries and limits of any single artistic vision. For that reason, I felt that graphic journalism was the best medium for tackling the subject of sex and the hidden and forgotten labor around sex in rural America.

For this particular project, to allow me flexibility, I work from sketches and paintings that I then make digital. I’ve also created a digital font out of my handwriting.

About the Artist

Hasanthika Sirisena’s essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, WSQ, anthologized in This is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and named a notable essay by Best American Essays in 2022. They are the author of the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Their essay collection Dark Tourist (Ohio State University/Mad Creek Press, 2021) won the Gournay Prize and was short-listed for a Lambda Literary award.

You can find Sirisena at their website.