(1961– )
The
title of Judy Horacek’s cartoon exhibition at the National Museum, Canberra,
from March to June 2002 is specially apt. I Am Woman, Hear Me Draw combines
the wit and feminism of her work and hints at her insistence that cartoons
are independent statements rather than accompaniments to written stories.
The exhibition will tour Australia later in the year.
Horacek took her BA from the University of Melbourne in 1991, following
her major in Fine Arts and English with a Diploma of Museum Studies.
Her Honours thesis, on the 1930s journal Manuscripts, inspired her with
the egalitarianism of print-making, making art accessible.
Cartoons published in Judy’s Punch, the Legal Service Bulletin and
Health Issues Centre Journal led to regular commissions from Australian
Left Review and Australian Society as well as publication in Meanjin.
Horacek’s first commissioned work for The Age, published on International
Women’s Day 1995, next to the obituary of Senator Olive Zakharov, was
Woman with Altitude, a work which has since appeared on countless fridge
doors, greeting cards, tea-towels and T-shirts.
When Horacek began publishing she found that ‘the Everyperson in cartoons
is traditionally a white, male figure. To make the central character
a woman risked people misunderstanding it, because they’d be sure if
it had a woman in it, it had to be about childcare or menstruation.’
Her cartoons have always been political, being as she says as ‘the graphic
equivalent of yelling into a megaphone’. Horacek’s interest in postmodernism
is as distinguishing a feature of her work as the clear, clean lines
of her drawing.
Several other members of the Horacek family are Melbourne alumni. Her
mother graduated in Science and her father in Medicine. Her uncle, John
Horacek (1942– ), was for almost 40 years Acquisitions Librarian in
the Borchardt Library, La Trobe University, and long-time editor of
Australian Academic and Research Libraries.
