H A T E O N L Y M E T H I S R E A L

Post-humus documentation of addiction

bleak
honest
obsessive
ominous
real

Series of 5 Zines

Limited to 20
Cover Weight / Japanese Paper
Text Weight / Italian Paper
Inkjet Printed
A6

$10
Free Delivery

An Interview with the Artist

What motivated you to start making zines?

Simple answer. Meth and depression. I had been making cassette j card artworks relentlessly over the 6 months prior to making zines. My life was miserable and the only distraction for me was printing and printing and printing. The nature of meth dependency also means I would just hyper focus on one thing at the expense of everything else. So yeh, the more miserable I got, the more meth I used and the more I would distract myself with printing. In the end, some positive things came from it. I reckon I know a lot about paper types and inkjet printing. I should write a blog about where to buy paper in Sydney and what paper is best to print on for certain desired results. Remember: grain direction is critical

Why should people look at your zines?

Why should people look at them? They shouldn’t. I do not make these zines for other people. I guess, through my photography and subject matter I am only trying to capture a feeling that I have felt deep down for a long time. Alienation, despair, grief, misery... the list goes on. I think I have managed to capture that feeling in a lot of these zines. The path of intravenous drug use to me was so bleak and haunting, I really had to document it. Something about what I was experiencing was so surreal and morbid that I felt an urge to try and express it through my art / photography.

What narrative are you portraying?

One of never leaving the house, except to roam the back alleys of newtown to pop out on king street for 10 seconds / duck into a shop to buy paper... to only leave the house at 4 in the morning to get clean needles from the fitpack vending machines... going to the nearest sharps Disposal to dumb a tonne of used fits. Shooting up in public bathrooms etc...

What is your favourite medium to use for zine making?

Favourite medium? As in favourite paper? I could do a whole interview on paper. It depends on lots of things... like, whether I want to print using the dye based black ink on my printer or the pigment based black ink. Also, what paper is available in what sizes and what grain direction those papers have. For example, I love this paper from Germany called GMUND cotton. It’s available to me (being a normal consumer who can’t buy wholesale etc) as 300gsm in a4 size. This is really good for printing covers, due to the high gsm. It prints really well as do most cotton papers. The reason why this is one of my favourites in the a4 size is because the grain direction is ‘short grain’ meaning that it folds with the grain, which is generally really important in book making. It’s especially important for text weight papers (the inner papers of the zines)*

*Continued... Some art paper / watercolour papers are also short grain... but generally most a4 paper is long grain. I use some nice a4 paper from other amazing paper mills around the world, but if the grain direction is long grain, I’ll cut it into a5 to make it short grain for smaller format zines. This may all sound confusing, but I love it. Obviously.

There is no joy in Narnia

Narnia is the realm that one enters

Addressing Narnia to announce its departure & celebrate the joy of a new life for yourself.