When The Dust Settles
Kevin Sezgin
About
I see myself as a sequential illustrator, I mainly work around stories and narratives. Most of my stories are dealing with the relationships we have with traumas. If anything I like to convey the idea that we don't end up becoming who we are, "thanks" to the bad things that happen to us, but rather, "despite" of them.
Project
When I decided to make a picture book, I realised that a book would only be as good as the story. Unfortunately I am not a writer, but that does not mean I don't have anything to say. The stories I can tell are very personal in nature. When I look back at my childhood, I can tell stories about a difficult upbringing. Themes about wanting to escape my environment, about being misunderstood, about longing to fill a void left behind by a missing parent, about repressed trauma's... etc. To tell these stories I relied on my own recollections, thousands of family photos, heavy conversations with people I grew up with, and even old journals. However none of these things seemed to bring me any closer to a coherent story. But then I remembered, When I was a kid, I was removed from home. I was kept in observation, diagnosed, medicated and followed. These things tend to leave a paper trail. So I dug up my own family archive and managed to find my own medical logs. There I found the story of my childhood told back to me by people who seemed to care very little, yet ended up deciding so much about my life. In there I found out that as a child, I was diagnosed with a verbal IQ of 80. I also found out that I was born with the umbilical cord stuck around my neck. Through my own research I found that the 2 often are related. Children born with a mild oxygen defficiency tend to develop a bit slower. Eventually they do catch up. Most notably, speech development is what tends to be most affected. Now, in English we have this expression "*to choke on your words*". I found it interesting how my own life line, that choked me out at birth, quite literally made me "choke on my words" later in life. I had this idea for a story about a child with a litteral knot around his neck, squeezing his throat so tight, he cannot express himself verbally. It is a story about trying to find your own voice in an unforgiving environment. Passages in the story, are based on passages from my medical logs. For this project I didn't only want to reinterpret my past, I wanted to reappropreate it. The result is an open ended work in progress, where you can find my thought process and workflow.