Aidan Koch on the ecologies of comics and fine art

You will be hard pressed to find a better exemplar of an artist bridging contemporary art and comics than Aidan Koch. She is a long time alternative comics favourite, exhibited and published by the Whitney museum and MoMA — her suggestive and fragmented narratives spanning comics, animation, art installations and jewellery.

Make yourself comfortable as Uncomics host Allan Haverholm sits down to talk to Aidan Koch about straddling two very different art worlds; making comics inspired by classic works of art; and applying her art to urgent environmental concerns.

The galleries below only cover the works discussed in this conversation. You really should visit Aidan’s website for a more extensive inventory of her books and exhibitions, as well as her current projects!

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Credits

The Uncomics podcast is edited and produced by Allan Haverholm. Music by Allan Grønvall Pedersen. All content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

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Works discussed

Iris (2016)

The whale (2010)

Images courtesy of a Spanish review of the book

The blonde woman (2012)

La éspiral (2020?)

Impressions (2014)

Configurations (2014)

Published online at Comics Workbook

Heavenly seas (2015)

in Paris review

Light drifting up a wall (2016)

from “Dreamlands” group exhibition at Whitney museum of American art

See also a video of Aidan’s animation (Youtube link)

Little angels (2016)

Published as part of MoMA’s artbook series

Man made lake (2020)

Mentioned in the talk as “just published this week”…

Further reading

• Derik A Badman’s review of Aidan Koch’s The whale (2010)
• An excellent 2016 interview with Aidan Koch — also available in French
• Study group comics, where The blonde woman was originally published online.
• Bill Kartalopoulos’ Bomb magazine article about Trenton Doyle Hancock.
  • More about Bill Kartalopoulos
  • More about Trenton Doyle Hancock
• Kuś, Latvia’s finest publisher of alternative comics.
• The Institute for Interspecies Arts and Relations
• Donna Haraway
• Aidan Koch’s Environmental comics, an ongoing project evolved from the concerns mentioned in this artist talk.
  • A recent Bomb magazine essay by Aidan Koch, talking about Environmental Comics.