At 16, Celeste Mountjoy had already found viral fame as an illustrator under her moniker @filthyratbag. The username, in her words, referred to being “a sneaky lil shit”, but it was also an apt descriptor of the Australian artist’s comics – deadpan, self-effacing, grotesque, bleakly relatable – which made their way feverishly across the internet. An elongated leopard appears like a non-sequitur beneath the words: “I’m really struggling at the moment”. Figures – blank and bare – cry in showers and ward off depression with vice after vice.
A profile in Dazed from 2016 called Mountjoy a cataloguer of “humanity’s most hideous attributes”; a Rookie magazine interview that same year raved about the sheer accuracy with which she documented the pitfalls of being “young and riddled with anxieties”. The characters in her work were hypocritical, exhausted and dependent on validation: like late-noughties indie sleaze before her and “gross girl” TikTok since, it was clear that she had tapped into some primal part of our brains, undamming our secret, collective urges to live deliciously.
