This book offers the first dedicated exploration of Connor Marie Stankard’s drawings, where pleasure and unease coalesce. Stankard’s figures feel both familiar and alien, emerging, dissolving, and mutating within the stillness of the page. At the core of her practice is a tension between vitality and decay, a theme rooted in the tradition of vanitas painting. But while the work acknowledges historical meditations on transience, it subverts their traditional moralizing in favor of eros and indulgence. 

Rendered in fluid, organic lines, Stankard’s drawings play with attraction and repulsion, form and dissolution. Like her paintings, they suggest bodies in flux, where beauty is fragile and impermanence is inevitable. This volume brings together a selection of key artworks alongside critical essays, offering a deeper understanding of the artist’s raw, unsettling, and deeply evocative drawing practice.