Our latest Spotlight on projects and people within the Graphic Medicine international community focuses on Charles Hackbarth and his in-progress graphic novel addressing mind-body dissociation, “The Fabulous Rain Runner”.
About the Artist
Charles Hackbarth is a Toronto-based artist, writer, podcaster, meditation teacher, and creator of experimental sounds. In 1976, at the age of fourteen, Hackbarth began an intensive study of visual art that lasted eight years. His first exhibition, Peek-a-boo, featured large figurative paintings and was presented at the Ottawa School of Art gallery in the summer of 1985. From 1986 to 1991, Hackbarth exhibited a number of mixed media installations based around drawings and paintings but also including sculpture, found objects, sound, and fragrances. From 1986 to 1989, Hackbarth pursued independent studies at OCAD in performance art, electronics, plastics, and new media. Throughout the 1990s he continued to produce work but didn’t exhibit again until 1998. Since then, he has shown at various galleries in Toronto including Gallery 1313 and Loop Gallery.
About Charles’ Work
I am currently working on a graphic novel about trauma, healing, spirituality, art, music, sex, death, the whole shebang. It is somewhat autobiographical, but heavily fictionalized. The core of the story was written in 1979 when I was 17. I had left home a year earlier, moved with my girlfriend and her family to another city. Suddenly I began to experience serious mind-body dissociation. (We know now that this is called Depersonalization or Derealization Disorder). At that time the doctors simply called it a “nervous breakdown.” Or agoraphobia, or that I was just a lazy bum and that I should get out there and get a job.
At that time I wrote a prose-poem (influenced by Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith) called “The Fabulous Rain Runner.”
The main feature of my condition was that I felt numb and stoned all the time. In the story, my character meets a (shaman) guide who is part bird and part human. This character (The Fabulous Rain Runner) leads my character on night time runs in the rain (which brought feeling and presence back to my body). The night time journeys lead to altered realities that always involve healers, therapists, shaman, spiritual teachers.
Mixed into the fiction and fantastical journeying is scientific or medical information about trauma.
Apologies for the typos and spelling mistakes. The work is still in process.