Olivia Plender is best known for an epic comic strip called The Masterpiece that is a critique on the Romantic idea of the artist as tortured genius. We follow her subject through the decades as he brings self-doubt and loathing to country house parties and bohemian London. Inspired by Hammer Horrors and classic chiller thrillers like Brian Forbes' Séance On a Wet Afternoon, it is a modernist parable. Her protagonist has the mad intensity of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French sculptor who died in the first world war, yet it is also a dark tale of skewed morality and high living not a million miles from the acid-laced antics of swinging London.
Plender is a little like a historian. She sets out to understand the origins of an idea but doesn't stop at the facts, preferring to follow an idiosyncratic cultural path. While making The Masterpiece, she interviewed Ken Russell – partly because he made a biopic about Gaudier-Brzeska but also because Russell is himself a self-appointed tortured auteur.
The results of her explorations are self-published in hand-drawn books which can be bought very cheaply. This approach makes Plender something of an anomaly in the art world yet has no doubt afforded her a certain amount of freedom.
When nominated for Beck's Futures in 2006, Plender exhibited large cut-outs and frame-by-frame pencil drawings inspired by spiritualism, the temperance movement and Romanticism. One of the most compelling stories was about the Fox Sisters, bogus mediums who founded the spiritualist movement in America in 1848. Three sisters hear strange rapping noises in their house in Hydesville, New York, and the ensuing excitement opens the doors to celebrity and wealth, with vast performances in music halls around the country. The inevitable decline into alcoholism and poverty is caused when the sisters are unmasked as frauds. It is a classic (if novel) tale of American entrepreneurialism and Plender treats it as such, while also unmasking the secret world of contemporary spiritualism.
Why we like her: For the pure gothic atmosphere of her drawings and her cultural catalogue that has no bounds.
Renaissance woman: Plender was something of a prodigy. She went to art school at 16 and is also a writer, a critic, a curator and the co-editor of the art magazine Untitled.
Naked ambition: She is a one-time member of a naturist society.
Where can I see her? Olivia Plender has curated and is exhibiting in the show TINA at The Drawing Room, London E2 until November 8, 2008.