Lily Ball caught up with Erin McGrath to reflect on her autobiographical comic inspired by her experience of new motherhood, commissioned for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2025.
The comic is a poetic wandering through the mixed emotions and tensions inherent in caregiving. Through McGrath’s imagery and prose the seemingly paradoxical ideas of comfort and disturbance creep together, revealing themselves to be two sides of the same coin.
In this interview McGrath illuminates the context of this work. I hope you enjoy her discussion of the ability for the comic form to nurture self-understanding, how her creative process looks different as a parent, and art’s value in cutting through the disorientation of new motherhood.
Have you used art to think about mental health before, or did this commission offer completely new artistic territory for you?
I have used comics in some form since I was a teenager to capture interactions and memories or as reflections on places I’ve lived. I studied fine art photography alongside working at a comic shop for a long time and these two environments really influenced how I went on to interact with the world.
When I was younger, figuring out how to make panels work together on a page served as a way for me to externalise and recognise recurring abstract images that I didn’t have the words for at the time. Words that would come later from learning more about my own mental health and eventually training as a psychotherapeutic counsellor.
There’s something so particular about making an autobiographical comic, where you can have many times present all at once on a page, that lends itself really well to processing personal experiences in a psychotherapeutic way.
What did the process of making the comic look like?
My process was a gradual development of scribbled notes and sketches beginning in the first two years of motherhood. Notes jotted down in the middle of the night often merging into the frantic documentation of wake times, feed times, nap times and lists.
When I look back at the thousands of phone photos from that period it feels so heavily self edited that it would be possible to look back and see no evidence of the isolation and sense of delirium in those early years.
Revisiting this collection of notes and sketches and shaping them into a comic gave me a different sense of agency and helped me take forward a more honest representation of the breadth of my experience.
Finding the time to work on the comic as it began to take shape was fragmented as I entered the new world of finding time to draw while looking after a toddler. I adapted my visual style to accommodate a quicker way of working and sketched out the panels on lunch breaks at work or when my kid was asleep at night.
How did you find approaching the theme of Comfort & Disturb in your artwork?
Honestly it felt like the words Comfort & Disturb jumped right off the page at me at that time. I knew I wanted to make something about new motherhood but was still heavily working through my own discomfort as a new mum.
There is such duality within the caregiving role where your whole purpose is to comfort and nourish this precious wee thing while at the same time your usual routines and coping strategies are out the window. Metamorphosis level change to your body and identity on two hours sleep can feel otherworldly. I think the theme speaks perfectly to this.
Now the first week of the festival has arrived, what do you hope audiences will get out of your work and how do you feel about making this deeply personal work public?
I hope that it resonates with parents and mums in particular who are feeling the pressure of adapting.
I felt so comforted and inspired by finding traces of my own experience in films (Nightbitch), comics (Becky Barnicoat) and the amazing Acts of Creation exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). I feel really grateful to have been supported by SMHAF to make this work.
By Lily Ball
Lily is part of the SMHAF Volunteer Collective and is based in Glasgow. She enjoys making things of all kinds and is interested in the therapeutic benefits of creating art.
