The Zine Fair!

So the Zine Fair was upon us, and we were ready. We arrived at the venue to see many students were ready and set up, so we joined them in getting everything out and ready to sell. We were sharing a table with other art history students and it was interesting to see the difference in what we had all made! Once the table was set out we all got to have a look around at everyone else's zines. I was really impressed by the quality of what everyone had created as well as there being an amazing range of different zines to choose from. I feel that everyone's presentation was fantastic and it was impressive to see everyone together as a group again to get selling!

To be honest I didn't expect as many people to come to fair as what did, the turn out was really good and really did get quite busy. For just being a student fair I believe that it really was a success. We sold around six of our zines and several of our postcards too so its always nice to see that people liked our zine!

So overall I believe the fair was a success, I enjoyed my time there and loved seeing what everyone else had done. I believe from the whole process I have learnt to work in a group more successfully as I usually dread the prospect of group work, however I feel like I have played an important role in the whole process and that we have worked well together. I believe it has been really useful throughout the progress meetings to get opinions from others outside your own group, there is a real sense of collaboration between everyone and everybody is really helpful to one another.

I have enjoyed the experience of being able to see something be created which started only from an idea, it has been a great experience to see this in action, I do believe that I now have a greater interest in zines, and I admire anyone who goes through the complete stress of creating them!

The Exhibizine Team

Other Unit X Exhibitions I've Visited

After working on our own Unit X project and only really seeing what students were doing in the Zine Fair, I found interesting to be able to visit others exhibitions.

I visited the Triskaidekaphobia Exhibition by a group of Film & Media and Fashion students. This exhibition was held in a little shop in Stevenson Square, I really enjoyed the exhibition, the space was only small however I feel they used it well by using literally every corner!  

Another exhibition I visited was by the Design Festival from the Blue Sky Thinkers College. This exhibition was held in the gallery space 'Self Made' underneath Bench in the NQ.
I can easily say I was really impressed with this exhibition, I thought the quality was fantastic, I was impressed with how technical and professional everything looked. The exhibition was both fun and interactive and had a great turn out. All the work looked superb and I feel the it held a real meaning for Manchester, and you could clearly see how the collaboration between students had been fully successful. Very impressed.

Planning the Zine Fair

So now that we had completed all the zines, we were wondered what else we could have for sale at the fair, as we thought it would be better to have something else on the table too. We decided that postcards would be a nice addition to sell, so our favorite selected pages from the zine were made into little postcards, by being printed onto photo paper. I really like the little postcards, I think they are a nice addition and are a success.

The postcards.

One member suggested that we had a booklet on the table not to sell, but to explain our ideas of why we chose each subject; we all liked this idea as it brought some background information to the zine and explained what we had created. We therefore each wrote a paragraph explaining our own subject to create the booklet.

I feel that with postcards and our booklet and all our finished zines that we are now ready for the zine fair. We have decided to bring a nice red table cloth for the fair, as we feel the zines will stand out strongly and look good against the bright colour. We've also made little price tags so as everything is ready for the day.

The Final Zine Making Session

So the zines are complete, we had a final session where we finished all the little bits that were to be done. There was a few odds and ends which we had missed so we went through all the zines making sure all of them were the same and nothing had got missed out.

Zine Making

Making the zines has taken a lot of time and we have met up several times as a group to get the process going. We have chosen to make our zines by hand, as it is more personal and each zine will in turn be slightly individual. The problem with making the zines by hand is that the process takes much more time, as each zine has to be worked on in the right order and in the same place, to do this requires a lot of patience. Our idea for the zine being to combine four different subjects into one zine means therefore that each page has at least four different aspects to be added to it, therefore it requires one person to do one aspect and then the zine is passed on to another person to add another aspect to the same page. This process sounds simple, being a work on it and then pass it on method, however different jobs take different amount of times and you soon get a build up of different piles of zines in different stages of production.

Although there has been difficulties making the zines, with members producing work to go in the zines at different times, and with difficulties getting the whole group together, I feel that overall we have done well and achieved a lot taking in the circumstances, although it would be a lie to say the process hasn't been a little bit stressful. However I feel like we have done well in deciding to make an 'original zine'; to set off with we made only one zine, and we finished to a standard where we could use it as a guide for all our other zines, using it to know where things need to go, what pages look the best together, and how many pieces of paper does each zine need and so on. It has been named the original and from that it has become quite sacred to our zine making process.

To create our zine it has required copious amounts of printing, scanning, cutting, photocopying, glueing and writing, and not forgetting the most important...cups of tea...tea means a happy group, which in turn means more work gets done!

Making our zine has been quite expensive, I believe this is because it is hand made; however I think the quality of them being hand made out ways the costs, and is worth it for the zines individuality.

The zines begin to take shape.

Piles of cut out images start to form.

The zines take shape, still blank as of yet, but its a start!

A well needed tea break.

No one said making zines would be tidy!

These photo show the process of making the zines, as you can see we caused plenty of mess! After meeting up several times I feel like we have made a lot of progress and we hope next time we see each other that we can finish them off.

Art Review Writing Workshop

The Art Writing Workshop has to have been my most inspiring time during Unit X, I felt it was relevant to my course and I found the lecture both interesting and inspiring.
We began the workshop by listening to a short lecture about where you can find art reviews and who they are aimed at. We discussed how you find reviews in different places that are aimed for different audiences, for example reviews found in newspapers are most often written in a manner that would appeal to a larger audience, the language normally being quite simple therefore no art knowledge is necessary to understand the  review. Online art magazines, and art magazines specifically designed for people with a keen interest in arts hold more complex reviews, using language that sometimes requires art knowledge to understand the review fully.

We looked at a 'a-n' an online art magazine; 'Interface' a section on the website is a place where people can post opinions and reviews of exhibitions where they are open for discussion. There is also opportunities available where you can receive a bursary to cover costs of getting to a exhibition to then write a review. This is an opportunity I am highly interested in, therefore I am going to keep my eye out to see if anything arises that really grabs my interest.

After reading a selection of reviews and getting to know the different tones in which reviews can be written we were asked how we felt about writing a review ourselves. This seemed a daunting task at first, I felt that I didn't have enough art knowledge to be able to write a review, also lacking the confidence to be able to assert my own opinion on an exhibition. Several other students said they felt the same way; therefore we discussed how we could reign in our own opinion and thoughts, as well as discussing methods on where to begin when review writing.

The Holden Gallery is currently holding the exhibition 'Creation/Destruction'; we therefore used this exhibition as a way of thinking about reviews and about how we would begin a review. I found this really useful being able to see an exhibition straight after talking of methods to reviewing, as I feel when you have a mind set to review and exhibition, you concentrate much more and take much more time simply looking.

Overall I found this a really useful workshop, I found it interesting and fitting to my interests, and I feel like I can take elements from the workshop and use them in either my own work or as a personal interest.

Risograph Workshop

The Risograph printer is most commonly used for duplicating as of its high volume. It was first used for high volume photocopying due its excellent costs. It works by burning a template onto a 'master', this master is then wrapped around a drum where ink is pushed through the master to be printed on the page. A master is capable of up to 500 prints, which allows for cheap printing compared to laser and inkjet printers. Risographs are best for using simple designs and only one or two colours; this is due to being able to use only one colour per master, therefore to add another colour you must add another master which will then print on top of the original page.

We were told that the university charges £1 per master, this was therefore a tempting method of printing; however our zine has many colours throughout its pages therefore we didn't think this would be an appropriate method of printing for ourselves.

This a copy of a print we were given as an example from the Risograph workshop. I like the quality of being able to move the different masters into different positions to create a overlapping and slightly blurred effect. I do really like the effect that the Risograph printer gives, therefore I think it is a shame that it wouldn't work for our zine.

I am glad that we had the opportunity to see how the Risograph printer works even though we won't be using it for our zine. As an art history student it is rare that we have the need or opportunity to use machines, it is therefore interesting and useful to be able to attend this workshop, so we then have the opportunity to use the Risograph in the future.