Sue Coe

I'm Sue Coe and I'm an artist and I'm also an activist, and I use art to create social change.

To make a painting or drawing or poem or a song is the opposite of violence because it's about craft, and it's about slowing time down. It's not about the immediacy of a violent act. So this work depicts violence, reflects violence, but the time taken to do it is about art.

In magazines, it's quite acceptable to show women naked in advertising, or being fetishized, but it's not okay to show the reality of the scene. And I think in America a woman is raped every three seconds. So when I started doing these rape paintings they were banned. They were banned in museums. It's such a common reality and yet it cannot be depicted in art, and yet it's all a reality.

detail from the "Romance in the Age of Raygun" series, 1984

I think women think about rape every time they go to a supermarket and get into their car, every time they go into a strange situation, but it's not necessarily vocalized. It's not the number one thought obviously, but it's back there and it's a sort of nagging backbeat of fear. I do think most women have that and they recognize it, they recognize it's there. And to live on the planet Taliban, because we all live on planet Taliban to a greater or lesser extent, where you're in the car park and you have to look around, or you open up your apartment door and you have to look around, that's the planet Taliban we all live on. And by recognizing that reality I think we might be able to change it as a species.

Yes, there's craft. The craft has to be there for people to trust the content. I figured this out quite early on. It's time consuming labor to ask people to approach the content and to talk to that content and to trust me that this is true. Just trust me. Just walk in and look and you won't be cheated, you won't be dissatisfied when you walk into one of these paintings or drawings. And that's the way I feel about Brueghel and Goya, there is no artifice, there's no falsity, one walks into the environment. So that's why I'm saying this is not, even though it depicts many violent acts. It is slowing time down in the craft.

detail from the "Romance in the Age of Raygun" series, 1984

I think people are changed by looking at art. I've been changed by looking at art and hearing music. And we can say, well, is beauty truth? No I don't think so. I think truth is beauty. So it will be, that's my analysis, what is truthful and real is also beautiful.

When some people look at a beautiful beach with blue water and the sand, I will look at the beautiful beach, the blue water and sand and I'll see a little speck in the water and it will be Exxon and it will be an oil barrel or a leak. And that is where my eye goes. It's a balance between beauty and ugly but I see one as very threatening so I focus on that. I was brought up next-door to a slaughterhouse and I was told to accept the normalization of slaughter. I was told over and over and over again that I shouldn't cry or make a scene when I heard the animals screaming. And I don't accept it. I want to go into that slaughterhouse and I want to, in a sense, acknowledge its existence so we can as a species dismantle that slaughter, the constant slaughter. But to not focus on that oil barrel, or that slaughterhouse, or that woman being raped, is accepting the normalcy of slaughter. That is not acceptable. So I'm looking and I'm searching and I don't have to look very far because it's next-door.