Feast Of Fields

By Sean Karemaker. Published by Conundrum Press. 

Softcover, 140 pages, B&W, 2018.

A touching mother / son immigrant story

‘Feast of Fields’ is a reference to the picnics Karemaker took with his mother in the upper fields of his elementary school. It is a graphic biography of the artist’s mother who grew up in Denmark in an orphanage because her mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and her father had left her and her siblings behind. She went on to raise her brothers from the age of seven. The story weaves between her story in the past and the present of the 1990s in British Columbia.

Using the objects from her youth as anchors to another time, Karemaker inherits and tries to understand these memories as her son. The book is a tribute to the qualities of selflessness, sacrifice and love associated with motherhood. The story will resonate with anyone familiar with immigration to Canada, poverty, or mental illness. Karemaker constructs the graphic novel through a series of scrolls, densely illustrated, then cut up to make the pages of the book, creating a truly unique visual and narrative experience.

There is an immersive Virtual Reality application of the story planned in conjunction with the release of the book.