It’s not typical for artists to go out and draw the world. The model for artists is to sit politely in their studios creating their most successful work over and over again until they die. Once, artists dominated image making. If a newspaper wanted to show what a war disaster looked like they sent over an illustrator, but once photography became advanced enough to fill that role, the visual arts turned inwards.

I grew up thinking art was frivolous. Artists were court jesters, Fabergé egg makers, we were Boucher and Damien Hirst, we made exquisite objects for the elite, and all our bohemianism, all our deeply held convictions couldn’t wipe that away.

As a broke art school dropout, I worked as a model. Not as a fashion model, obviously I’m about a foot too short for that. I worked as a naked model for amateur photographers. Nothing will make you think about money and power like smearing yourself in jam and posing for dentists with really, really souped-up cameras.

I wasn’t particularly great at making money off of my looks but beautiful girls were an addiction. Never have I seen a stripper without thinking she was a philosopher queen. Burlesque was blowing up in New York. I started drawing dancers. Burlesque girls are alchemists. They will slap their costume bag through the snow, change in a kitchen, go into debt on Swarovski crystals, but once they get up on stage for five minutes they are a goddess.

I grew up with a Toulouse-Lautrec fetish. Toulouse-Lautrec was the poster artist for the Moulin Rouge. He was an alcoholic dwarf with syphilis who would hide out in the corners drinking absinthe but he captured all the ambition and darkness behind the Can-Can Girl’s ruffles. I wanted to be Toulouse-Lautrec. We liked the same drinks, we were almost the same height.

When I got the job as a staff artist for a nightclub the dream came true. It was the sort of impossibly swank joint where Saudi princes blew through £20,000 a night on champagne. Meanwhile on stage, the world’s best Vaudeville performers would do acrobatic, carefully choreographed, beautifully lit acts about cutting off banker’s heads.

My boss had all the depravity of a Borgia prince, but god dammit he got my art. I drew my beloved performers as gods, customers were coke snorting pigs.

Sometimes all I think it takes to get political is a sharp eye, a mocking disposition and discomfort for your place in the world.

Artists are in an odd space. On one hand we are the most fancy highfalutin of the fancy. People say that they don’t know art but they know what they like. Implying that art is a rarefied space where you need an advanced degree to even presume to know what would be good. Average people are told over and over again that their instincts for visual art are stupid and wrong. They are made to feel ashamed and scared.

My one brush with doing proletarian labour was doing murals on a construction site. Unlike the other workers I was allowed to drink on the job and come in whenever I wanted. Because I was an artist, I was fancy, I was of the same class as the owners. I could be trusted.

On the other hand, I am an artist. My job is to apply coloured mud onto a surface, just like a construction worker. On a mural job I’d be covered in toxic dust, freezing and wobbling on a rickety platform. I have dirty nails and rough hands, I can’t keep a manicure.

When famous artists pay young people $10 an hour to do their work for them they are reproducing the worst excesses of the financial world. Art is carpentry as much as metaphysics. We’re blue-collar workers with pretensions of the sublime.

I thought about these things a lot but I had never let them bleed into my work. I had marched against the Iraq war. When those million people marches failed so spectacularly to change anything all organised political resistance in America felt like theatre. To do a poster around a protest felt like a preachy lie. I also thought that because I came from the sex industry and drew pretty girls for a living that activism was something that was too exalted for me to deserve to be part of. So I’d sell my work and then quietly donate it to causes I believed in.

Then in 2011, the world exploded. In one country after another, people sat down in the main squares of their city — Tahrir, Puerta del Sol, Syntagma, Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, Zuccotti Park in New York — and they declared that the old world was broken. Not all the police charges in the world could convince them otherwise.

The singer and civil rights hero Paul Robeson said, ‘The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I see no alternative, I’ve made my choice.’ Robeson was speaking as a young man during the Spanish Civil War but he might have been speaking to me and the people we knew when Occupy Wall Street set up their tents outside my window. An artist can engage in politics as a documentarian or a propagandist or just a searching human trying to puzzle out where the world broke.

I first went down to Zuccotti Park to draw the protesters. The media, as the media in America always does, said that they were dirty-hippie-filthy-scumbags, who didn’t want to get a job and were lazy and mooching off of good honest citizens, but that wasn’t what I saw. I saw construction workers, I saw veterans, I saw old ladies doing knitting. Someone held a sign saying, ‘Give a damn,’ and that’s what they did, they gave a damn. Zuccotti Park itself was a mini city with a library, a free clinic, a gourmet soup kitchen. There was even a table giving out free rollies.

In the middle of New York City where every usage of public space is regimented, here was a space that was free. It was also a space where the left, which is usually an ineffectual snake-pit, came together. Union guys stood shoulder to shoulder with Brooklyn party promoters. This scared power. The police would arrest 700 people in one day and they barricaded half of down-town Manhattan. They even put a little fence around the bull. It was like it was in a little cage.

I wanted to help however I could, I donated need money and clothes and tarps. I turned my apartment into a pressroom. Journalists from around the world would mooch off of my Wi-Fi and drink my booze. I also began to draw protest posters. When the police raided Occupy Oakland they put a veteran in a coma by shooting him in the head with a canister of tear gas and so I drew Can You See the World Through the Tear Gas.

I’d put posters online for download and give the files to Occupier friends. Hours later they’d be out on the street as protest signage. My May Day poster was my most widely distributed image. The usual way that the worker is portrayed in art is as this square-jawed, muscular man working at a factory but in America those jobs have all been outsourced to China. The actual worker in America is very often a woman of colour. This image was pasted on squats and walls, and buildings around the world.

When I made art for WS I was trying to persuade sceptics like myself. We all know what activist art looks like. It’s red, it’s black, it’s Soviet influenced. It has really sharp angles, it is awesome dynamic design. But you know exactly who this is meant for when you see it. I think that for the revolution to have an official aesthetic is like for the revolution to have a shoe brand.

I wanted to make art for people who hadn’t considered themselves activists. People like me but people who care deeply for their friends and for the larger world. So I kept my Rococo aesthetic. I drew women, I drew animals, I drew protest art that look like a fairytale. Artists are individualists — my favourite muralist, Diego Rivera was repeatedly expelled from the Communist Party because he was just too idiosyncratic, and too ambitious, and a bit too money hungry honestly, to be what the party leaders wanted him to be. Orwell showed writers that their responsibility was to look unflinchingly at their friends as well as their enemies. Even when it was hardest.

Artists must do the same. If you are an activist and an artist there is a constant evil tendency to want to airbrush your own side, but the best political art is the product not of official movements but of the flawed search in the human brain.

During Occupy I became friends with a young British journalist, Laurie Penny. In November, the police shut Occupy down. They cordoned off all of down-town, cracked a bunch of heads, and they threw that mini city into a dumpster.

That night, at 3:00am, Laurie knocked on my door, scuttled down my fire escape with her phone clenched between her teeth for light, to get behind police lines. Afterwards, we would drink and smoke and try to figure out what was going to happen with the world later.

Occupy was just one of the movements rattling in the world in 2011. We decided to do work about another one. Right now, Greece is an EU country sliding into fascism, it’s wracked by debt and austerity. A quarter of people are unemployed and the Nazi Golden Dawn is the third most popular political party in the country. They claim they’re not Nazis, but their logo is a swastika and they murder immigrants. Their MPs make videos of themselves destroying immigrants shops and they punch female politicians on TV. They’re Nazis, look it up on YouTube.

Equally Greece is the stage of leftist resistance. On TV, you can see tons of footage of the protests where there is tear gas, and fire, and masked up young kids. What you don’t see is places like Navarinou Park and Exarcheia, where anarchists came in at night with jackhammers to a disused parking lot and turned it into a playground for kids. You don’t see people fighting as hard as they can to feed and clothe and protect each other in a society that has failed them.

Laurie and I decided to go to Athens and record what we saw there. We spent a week interviewing activists, anarchists and immigrants. Getting insanely drunk at parties and watching bloodied street demonstrations. Out of the experience, we made Discordia. Discordia is an e-book, half words by Laurie, half art by me. We were inspired by Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, but we were also two girls running around Europe with lots of ambition but no money for drugs.

This was the first time I had used art as reportage. We live in the most image saturated age in history. A thousand Twitter-pics mark the occasion whenever a cop busts protester’s skull. I wanted to prove that even in a world like this an artist still had a reason to leave the studio, and that illustration still had something to say.

Here’s what I found — drawings, like photojournalism, distil the essential. They remove photo blur, accidents of lighting, but visual art, unlike photojournalism, has no pretence of objectivity. It’s joyously and defiantly subjective. It’s truth, and the truth there is individual. Picasso’s Guernica revealed nothing about what a body looks like after you carpet bomb a town square but it revealed everything about how horrifying war is.

Artists are typically the dorks in the corner, staring all creepily at everyone because they can’t actually make conversation. I got images of places where we wouldn’t have been allowed to take photos, like occupied cafes that were under constant police harassment.

I also got images of the police, who you weren’t allowed to photograph. I drew them as hulking comic book caricatures of men. Rigged out with tear gas and riot shields, and machine guns because that’s what they kind of looked like. They looked like Rob Liefeld caricatures and they would hang out on street corners harassing anyone who was young or brown skinned.

Laurie later called me out for making them look like things rather than humans but I think that when you put on the uniform of a fundamentally corrupt institution, that’s what you become. We covered the leftist newspaper, Eleftherotypia. This was a newspaper that before the crisis had a stature similar to the Guardian. It even had a building with its name on the side. Really awesome skyscraper, old school printing press downstairs. However, during the crisis, the owner had embezzled money and the journalists had physically thrown the owner out, were occupying the building themselves and were sustained only by Raki, cigarettes and love of hardcore investigative journalism. They were heroes and it was an honour to draw them.

I drew the memorial of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Alexandros was a sixteen-year-old boy who was murdered by the police. He was shot in the back of the head. This memorial is like the graffiti covered heart of the most graffiti covered city I have ever seen. Behind it is a mural of gas mask wearing protesters and written over and over and over again, ‘A.C.A.B, all cops are bastards.’

I drew striking steelworkers. I worked from Laurie’s photos of an anti-fascist demonstration. The Golden Dawn was going around in an immigrant neighbourhood and telling local shopkeepers that if they didn’t close up their businesses and move back to Pakistan, the Golden Dawn would burn it down for them. The neighbourhood decided to demonstrate to show that they weren’t afraid. At the start of the demonstration the police announced that they would not protect the protesters from any fascist attacks. I drew a young boy walking through the protest, through the bloodied side-walks and the Nazi graffiti. In an homage to Rockwell’s anti-segregation painting, The Problem We All Live With. Back home working from iPhone snaps and conversations with Laurie, I reconstructed the city on paper.

I tied the art together with graffiti. Athens has more of it than I have ever seen and has more dark poetry than I have ever suspected it could have. ‘Don’t rely on the police for everything.’ ‘Hit yourself.’ ‘I don’t need a loan. I need some substance.’ ‘Mum, I’ll be late. We’re at war.’ When I drew people I tried to not only draw what they looked like but who they were. The strength and worry, the courage and pain. I tried to capture the electricity in the Athens’ air

Laurie’s words are fierce and powerful things. I wanted to make art that could live up to them. I got arrested within days of finishing Discordia. I’m not the type who gets arrested, which means that I’m a really short little white girl in expensive shoes and cops usually flirt with me. But, on the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street I was dragged by my arm into the street and released eleven hours later with a summons for blocking traffic. They arrested 150 people that day. We were locked in freezing cells so small that we had to take turns sitting down, and we would line up in front of each other so that the male officers couldn’t watch us use the bathroom. Occupy Wall Street taught middle-class kids what poor people and people of colour had always known, that the law can be a cruel and arbitrary thing that turns against you in a second. I was furious and shaken for everyone who had spent time in that horrible place. As soon as I got out, I drew the experience and my jail cell for CNN.

That protest turned out to be the last real gasp of Occupy Wall Street. After hurricane Sandy wrecked New York, Occupy turned its energies to helping people, and that was a lot of New York who had no power and no water. But, it was never the same and I wonder if it ever will be.

2011 is gone, the ecstatic rebellions have faded away under police suppression and the Arab Spring has turned violent, but that year changed us. It changed my art, it changed me and we will have another 2011 again.

Images have power — there is a reason Syrian cartoonist, Ali Farzet’s hands were broken by the regime. In New Delhi, caricaturist Aseem Trivedi is being charged with sedition and Thomas Nast’s cartoons of Tammany Hall helped bring down a corrupt political machine.

Images get under your skin, past your defences, past your compassion fatigue, right into the raw edges of your heart. I drew to relate to people, I drew the popular kids in school so they wouldn’t hit me. I drew my way into nightclubs who wouldn’t let me pass the velvet rope. I drew to show Moroccan street kids that I was more than a dumb tourist. Drawing was a way to take the world, make it comprehensible, put it in a sketchbook, make it mine. My political art started in the same way. I drew protest art because the world was changing. I wanted to be a full human and to do that, I had to let my work change with it. I couldn’t look away.

I started out as a girl who drew beautiful naked women for nightclubs and I still am, but I also became concerned with the rest of life. I would ask you, too, to use what you love to interrogate the world. The roles society has for us are so narrow, we can be serious or we can be frivolous. We can be activists or we can be artists. We can’t care about the larger world without giving up parts of ourselves. I would ask you to give up nothing. I would ask you to question power, and I would ask you most of all not to be afraid. Thank you.