Saturday, March 28, 2020

Small worlds: my zines

Austin Kleon uncovered the world of zines for me a couple of weeks ago—and the timing couldn't be better.

Self-isolation further fostered my need to make things with my own two hands.

I'm lucky to have the flexibility to work from home, and stay safely secluded with my family, but isolation and screens wear on you.

Zines give me an opportunity to extend my imagination beyond the four walls. While my hands are busy cutting, gluing, and arranging bits of magazine scraps, my mind wanders far away from the coronavirus and the change it forced onto all of us.

For my first zine, I took a very lackluster approach. I didn't plan its flow or content. I opened an old edition of the Economist and picked visuals that struck me, and stuck with me. I first built the last page, then the first, and then had to find the way to connect them through the middle.

What came out of the process, was a gloomy story of a man who is different, and disliked for it.


There was more of an intention behind my second zine. I had a cut-out of a fish, or a screaming girl, and some building roofs. I put those together. Then I went looking for a poem to inspire the rest. I went for Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit, because she'd surely have something strange enough to follow the story of a girl flying on a fish. And she does indeed.

A floating city 
The second level world 
Upstairs on the clouds 
Mountains and rain roaring underneath 
Like venice, we have to commute by 
boats through air currents to visit 
eachothers floating houses. 
Cloud gardens to watch all day

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