In the Black Water

Returning to the small seaside town outside of Newcastle where I grew up after spending so much times in bustling London, I found it filled with melancholy. The already cold, decaying place had been filled with deathly silence. Left only with the sounds of the wind and sea, the emptiness reminded me of the beginning of horror films, despite things appearing perfectly normal there is an aura of uncanny menace.
Inspired by this, I set out early in the morning to photograph the more eery parts of the coast. Using these images, I played upon the surreal visual of places usually filled with people being completely empty. I edited the colours of parts of the images and cut them apart and put them back together with photoshop, like a digital collage.
I appropriated quotes from Jeff Vandermeer’s book Annihilation adding them to the best suited images and rearranging these new images to create a narrative. I used fonts from various well-known horror film posters to enhance the association with horror and remind the viewer of film posters and trailers.
I arranged the images into 2 separate zines, one heavily edited and one playing on the natural uncanniness of the photographs. Through these, the text reads almost like a poem written specifically for the work. I distributed these zines digitally and I had no access to equipment to print them, however, in the future I would like to distribute my work digitally and well as physically as it allows the work to reach a wider group of people.
My interest in zines as a form of art came from my involvement in the Newcastle independent music scene when I released my first zine Grim Up North that featured interviews and reviews with local artists alongside paintings inspired by their work. As well as this, growing up in the North post-thatcher meant I and many other people have very little access to art. This has made me want to make my work accessible for anyone to see, touch or own. Therefore, zines, which I can print and post or distribute online are a way for my art to be accessed without much cost or needing to travel to a gallery.
Towards the end of my last project I started thinking about other unconventional ways art is distributed. I created imagess inspired by nostalgic reprints of posters from to 50s to 70s advertising my local area as a holiday destination. I reused photos I had taken in the same location as the posters depict, digitally drawing figures into the image alongside a black border with text from one of the original posters.
However due to lack of equipment and space I couldn’t expand upon this idea at the time. I would like to develop this idea on a larger scale taking inspiration from other sorts of posters and experimenting with other mediums alongside screen printing such as stencilling and large-scale printers. As well as, thinking about how I can distribute the posters and how they could work alongside zines in a gallery context.