illustrator and cartoonist, was born on 3 July 1962 at Portsmouth, UK. She studied at the University of Western Sydney in 1990-93 and was awarded a BA in Graphic Design, with a major in illustration. She won first prize in the University Christmas Card and Poster Competitions in 1993 and came second in the University Advertising Poster Competition the same year. While a student, she worked at the Chris Cross Art advertising agency. Her first published cartoons appeared in Burn, a gay and lesbian magazine, in March 1993. The series included her colour cartoon 'Fortunately Brenda also had a problem with decision making’, later (1999) published on the Internet. It depicts a woman seated at her kitchen table contemplating a razorblade, knife, pills and pistol laid out in front of her. A noose hangs from the wall and the oven door is open. Bray-Cotton’s treatment of her subject is decidedly good-humoured, although with something of the sardonic tone of Dorothy Parker’s poem, 'Résumé’, published in the author’s first collection Enough Rope, 1927: 'Razors pain you;/ Rivers are damp;/ Acid stains you;/ And drugs cause cramp./ Guns aren’t lawful;/ Nooses give;/ Gas smells awful;/ You might as well live.’ (Also an accidental but interesting parallel with the Bulletin cartoonist Jean Cullen, who suicided by putting her head in a gas oven.)
Examples of Bray-Cotton’s black and white work include: Fuck the good ship lollypop (curly-haired moppet [Shirley Temple] wearing leather straps across her bare breasts, fishnet stockings and holding a whip); Annie had a liking for domesticity (seated, naked woman, shown from the neck down, with clothes pegs on her nipples, an extension cord tying her to the chair and a rolling pin between her legs); and Marlene wondered if it was inappropriate to excuse herself for breathing (big, awkward-looking girl).
Her work has been reproduced in the Star Observer, Cosmopolitan, Cleo, House & Garden, Campaign (magazine), Sponge (magazine), DIY Feminism (?), Capital Q (newspaper), and the Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald. She has been designing postcards for the Ink Group since 1992. Bray-Cotton illustrated the Travel Box guidebook in 1997 and collaborated with Avantcard and astrologers Bernadette Brady and Darrelyn Gunzburg to produce a series of free postcards profiling the twelve signs of the zodiac. Her three solo exhibitions include one of illustrations at Hester Gallery, Sydney, in 1996.
In response to Joan Kerr’s 1999 black and white artists survey Bray-Cotton explained that she draws cartoons as a 'RELEASE OF ANGST USUALLY’ and bemoaned the fact that 'MOST PEOPLE LAUGH BUT WON’T PUBLISH’. In her letter to Kerr she stated 'The magazine [Burn] is old and I grabbed the easiest cartoons to send you, being photocopies of some of my stuff… I have 'blocks of cartoons’ through different periods of time so the tone is quite varied.’
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
