Big Dogs & Little Cats is a series of miniature zines based on personal conversations with my autistic older brother, Forrest. It includes two booklets bound by transparent vellum and construction paper, containing various illustrations, photographs, and custom stickers.

For most of our lives, I’ve acknowledged my brother’s identity only through his non-verbality—the lack of communication had led to me judging him as a neurotypical outsider, responsible caretaker, and ultimately stranger. In order to disrupt this way of thinking, I sought to collaborate with him regarding his favorite drawing subject: animals. During a particular phone call, he wished that he was a wolf so that he could eat bad people, and thought that I would be a cat because of how sleepy and depressed I tended to be.

Embodying those words, I utilize wolves (and other canines) and cats (and other felines) as visual surrogates for him and I respectively throughout the booklets. Taking advantage of the transparent material of the vellum, the spread design layers human portraits with cheerful images of cartoon animals, forcibly mixing their oppositional contexts through overlapping.