Pause, reassess, keep going
A necessary part of the process
The world doesn’t need another drawing.
The world doesn’t need another collage.
It’s all been done before.
There is no point to making anything. None whatsoever. It won’t change a thing. It don’t mean a thing.
There is no need to make a zine about doves, penguins, and ducks.
There is already too much noise. Too much sadness. Too much of everything. No one is listening.
And no one will notice if you never make another drawing, collage, zine, or artists’ book.
Try for a year; I dare you. Make nothing and see if the world stops turning.
When you’ve exhausted this train of thought, sometimes you realise that the answer is in the question. Because the world doesn’t need another collage is precisely why you need to make one.
The world does need a zine about the tremendous beaks of ducks — a celebration of form! A meditation on what is. For in this there is hope. A tiny nugget of hope. Art is hope. A gleam in the darkling world! There needs to be artists’ books about endangered species, habitat loss, the effect of human excess and thoughtlessness, addressing issues from a single perspective, and the consequences of taming the wild. There needs to be both art as amusement and as comment, and sometimes both, and more, at the one time. Be it hammer through ice, mirror, provocation, tripwire (my favourite), whatever.
Why not? What is there to lose? Because, yes, no one will notice if you never collage another Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) strolling through a cultivated garden setting. That is precisely why you need to do it. And if not you, then there is always someone else who will.
My own creative will is now slowly returning after a spell; I had mistaken a rest period for the end. When you've exhausted how pointless it all feels, you pick up the scissors, sharpen them, and start slicing something that has its own worth, no matter how quiet and unassuming. It is not pointless, after all. It is the point. Without it, there is nothing.
Knowing this, of course, is one thing. Feeling it, another. Feeling and acting upon it. So after growing weary of standing still and having looked the other direction....
Pause, reassess, keep going.
Repeat.
Pause, reassess, keep going.
This is the right pathway to tread. The other renders you mute and rudderless. Now, that is a grim place, indeed.
And so, in readiness for the annual Sticky Institute zine fair at the Melbourne Town Hall, a suite of drawings and collages in zine form, because the world does in fact need different voices. All of them. Why else do you wake?
Yes, the world needs another drawing.
Yes, to the transcendent power of literature, art, and music.
Duck in, duck out; Dove, love, wash; and Flippered and flightless are three new zines by Louise Jennison, each an edition of 100, in the tradition of Seasonal Museum Sketches (2016) and Whoot-woo (2015). They will be available from our stall as part of Sticky’s Festival of the Photocopier. Entry is free. Come along, raise a flipper, and say hello.
Sticky Institute presents:
Festival of the Photocopier Zine Fair 2017
Melbourne Town Hall
Sunday the 12th February
12–5pm
All available zine titles can also be purchased through our online store, which has had a little overhaul of late.
Image credit: Piron, Art Nouveau Hair postcard series, Atelier Reutlinger, Paris
