I think my new asthma meds are starting to work, it doesn’t hurt as much to breathe today. 🙂 Thought I would share a project with you I finished a little while ago, the zine (handmade magazine) made in my workshop by the members of a local queer youth Drop In.

We had a really good time connecting over art supplies and exploring different things they wanted to say and different ways to express it. I first zine making workshops during the statewide consultation process I helped design and facilitate for the government last year, and of all the amazing submissions, it remains one of my favourites. Some of the entries brought people reading them to tears.

Sometimes amazing art is about tremendous skill with the medium and materials. Sometimes it’s an obsession with capturing the light, with pigments or clay, with developing your craft age pushing your skills to the masterful.

But sometimes it’s about the content. It make take 20 minutes with a biro and a folded piece of copy paper and still have the power to bring someone to tears. Zines can be great art in that way. Created in a few hours like this workshop, there’s simply no time for fretting about getting your prose perfect or how awful your drawing skills are, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s raw, imperfect, authentic. It captures something often lost in more considered, polished works of art. It’s a kind of consultation process in itself – what matters to you? What’s in your mind? It’s an ink blot analysis. When I give you this marker, what wants to come out of you? The speed at which these are made forces us past the anxieties that great art brings, instead of waiting for perfect words and images we speak, uncertainly, now. And we cross out, paint over, play with, interact with, what we’ve spoken. Zines are special that way.

Handmade books are, for me, taking the zine into another space. Where the zine is cheaply reproduced, rough, raw, punk, DIY, uninhibited, the hand made book is more considered. It’s the zine, polished. My handmade books are text and image, the place where my passion for both combines. They are days spent painting or embroidering a single page.

They are rough drafts laid out and arranged and rearranged to find balance.

This is the layout of my current one, all artwork, poems, and articles contributed by prisoners and organisations who care about their health and welfare. It’s the prototype so so much has been learned along the way. I’ve been kept busy figuring out copyright, front matter, submission guidelines, editing long articles to fit the space, choosing commercial fonts that are highly readable for those with low literacy levels or vision impairment. It’s a labour of love, showing off every submission to its best.

I always ask to keep a zine from every workshop, my collection is now wonderful and I bring some of it along to new workshops to inspire. I am very much looking forward to sharing the next zines and artbooks with you.