Realise: Printing and Binding

Preparing for the final critique, there were some epic battles with printers. Theoretically, inDesign has a feature which figures out the pages/orientation for a given printer. However, the night before the critique, I could not get them working. There were many a printer fails.

Because so much of my preparation time went into sorting out the printer, I didn’t have much time to think about binding. I knew that for the version of the zine that would be made to distribute for the projected launch date of the Autism Awareness Walk in April, that the printing means would be simple: just paper and something to bind it with.

In the past for zines, I have used folding mechanisms (Manifesto) and string (Artefact), but I wanted to branch out. In a split decision, I asked Anna if she had any safety pins that I could place in my publication. I tried a couple of different iterations, but I liked the ones with the safety pins on the inside center folds the best: they are quick, aesthetically pleasing, and cheap.

The safety pin also added a certain ruggedness to the zines themselves, which feel a bit inherently punk because due to the medium and black and white aesthetic. But also, they suggest a functionality to the zine. Safety pins can be used as tacs to post up posters to spread awarnesss. Thus, the pages have the potential to have a life cycle beyond the first set of hands that they happen toencounter.

In additon to making zines for Austism Awareness Day in New Orleans, I wanted to make a couple of the versions of the zine that were quite precious. (As a result, they were much more difficult to bind.) Having looked at William Kentridge’s book of prints ‘Trace’ I was moved by the way his voice seemed to edit/comment on his own works/other works. A lot of Kentridge’s work, particularly his prints, are created over Pre-existing documents/layered. This is ultimately interesting a it brings about another component to the prints of Kentridge themselves. But, it is ultimately destructive.

Tracing paper allows for the marks to be a part of the piece but to not bury the process/thing that came before. Tracing paper allows the print to move and live on, to reveal as well as hide. As a result, I decided to print some of my images on tracing paper to see how they could layer upon to the existing prints, having made a couple of layouts with this in mind. Though I liked the result, particularly of the spread that hides the ‘Questions I am Afraid to Ask” spread, the assembly was quite difficult with a cover.

It would also not be cost effective in the long run for a zine, as a pack of tracing paper cost about £8. Though I would have liked to have added this component to the prototype zine to be distributed, it would be a difficult workload as well. My process involves cutting, printing, and then scanning, to make the prints accessible/removed digitally. The prints themselves were much more physically satisfying, but by their nature, the prints as image would be difficult to distribute on a large scale. (The ink I used also would get on people’s fingers. I did look into oil based paints/different papers, but they would not be cost effective.) However the tracing paper brought an element of an ephemeral/disappearing nature into the zine itself.

Some spreads with the tracing paper added

This is something that I had hoped to retain in physicality as a nod to the experimental books on clear acetate that I hs created in investigate and with the shattered rooms image. It is something that I also attempted to work into my layout with fragmented pieces of prints distributed throughout. Thus, this zine, or the ones I have produced for this project, are ultimately print works over zines. The prints themselves will have a separate life perhaps.

Realise: Making Spreads for the Zine

Now that I had all of this experimental print behind me as well as a body of writing, it was time for me to compile all of the different elements into one, cohesive zine. I wanted to keep the layout fairly simple, but I ended up using fractured elements of my prints on pages with text alone. This was in a way a remnant of the experimental ‘comic’ panel pieces that I had been doing, but they also served an aesthetic function.

Overall, the text bleeds through quite uniformly to weave in and out of the prints. When writing the text, I realized that I had to tell much more of Matthew’s story as well as our parents’ story to understand this as a whole. It very much felt like a catharsis to write the words and place them next. to the images that had been made with the subject, but not the exact narrative in mind. To this sense of narrative creation, I look to William Kentridge as well, as he describes himself as an improvisor in print and in animated storytelling. However, I am taking that in a slightly different direction in that my improvised words are ultimately designed to be written.

Realise Week Four: Printing like a Madwoman

Clare and I discussed print in more detail after I started entertaining the possibility of applying to the RCA for print. In this project, I discovered that I am more excited about the printing aspect than anything else (the writing/bookbinding/audeince research), so in addition to printing the zine with the targeted story and focus, I will make some prints to live on their own. Clare also suggest that I work with the press.

In the the interim critique, one of the pieces of feedback that I got was that I needed some more context for the issue at hand besides these narrative graphic prints. I plan to do this with writing, but I also wanted to provide some context using some prints of a map of the city of New Orleans. Logistically this was quite difficult to achieve.

I also worked in making some more experimental graphic panels to see how the pieces bled into one another. This was one advantage of the linocut block and the black ink-different configurations could act as motifs, wildly cluttered together. Using the press made that even more uniform.

Working with print made me turn my eye to William Kentridge’s print’s in particular. He makes some narratives using etchings in a similar manner: sans words.

William Kentridge Etching from William Kentridge Prints

Kentridge’s works are much more detailed/have more movement because of the media he uses, but the black and white and the juxtaposition give the works a similar cinematic feel.

Researching a Different Story/Narrowing Focus

After looking at the general trajectory of the linocut pieces that I had made, and talking to Cato, it seemed like a more targeted approach/more specific story might be the wisest way forward for the creation of this particular zine.

I was a little stuck on the text of what to do, and considering that that would be half of the layout, it seemed odd that I hadn’t payed it any mind. Though, the linocut prints that I had created seemed to have a similar theme: the house.

After talking to my mom, mining for Matthew stories, lots of memories came up about how difficult it was to find a school for Matthew when we were younger: how there was no infrastructure in the city of New Orleans for him at all because the Charter School system makes it such that schools don’t have to accommodate people on the spectrum. They also take all of the public funding.

My mom and dad tend to be a little sensitive on the subject about what is going to happen when Matthew, my brother, gets older. He is a difficult case for a boy on the autism spectrum: he is non-verbal, he has many phobias, and he can be violent when he gets into a state. We don’t really talk about what will happen when my parents get too old to take care of him. He didn’t respond well to moving houses when hurricane katrina destroyed our childhood home in 2005, and he was 7 then. Now he is 21 and it is unclear whether myself or my siblngs will be the person to ultimately take care of him.

However, my mom said to me, ‘You know, Brooke, at Matthew’s school, we are trying to band a bunch of parents together who are in a similar situation to see if we could build a house through the school.”

This gave me the idea that all of these prints about the house could come together to actually tell a story for a cause: the materials to get the conversation started for building such a house with this school in New Orleans.

With this narrowed focus, I decided that I would start working on prints of more architectural elements as well as images of my brother directly. Too, now I knew what to write about.

A Similar Project in Photography

When I was talking to my older sister to try to excavate stories from her, she sent me an article about an artist undergoing a similar project in photography: https://mymodernmet.com/timothy-archibald-echolilia/?fbclid=IwAR1LcX7DVQ3bPuGc69NmPb5D1oOZKET8N15_J-arldoryA4vf63M4B-4cFo

These works are very beautiful and very personal. Looking at them, they made me realize that I may have cast a net too wide in my original zine focus. What this project shows is a father’s attempt to document and celebrate the atypical behaviors of his son who is on the spectrum using the language that he happens to have for documentation: photography.

Even though I do not practice photography, I think that the relationship here between the person behind the lens and the person depicted in the photograph is embedded in the work. Because it tells such a specific story of two individuals, the compositions hit hard–especially because it feels like their story to tell and told in the voice that Timothy Archibald can speak in.

This has made me reconsider whether I want to cast such a wide net at this stage. Logistically too I have the majority of stories about my own brother. Perhaps focusing on him would pack a harder punch. But then is the main goal just to get a window into his life?

Week 2: Stories and Prints

The meat of week two was dedicated to generating images for the zine in response to the stories I had collected, and to use those stories and images as a measurement to see who else I needed to reach out to.

The stories that I collected so far were a series of my own writing, particularly in relation to my brother’s understanding of object permanence, as well as stories from my family and a few of my friends. I let the prompt be quite loose, so as a result, the stories that I collected were more vignettes than anything else.

The Matthew stories came to me as voice notes, which I have transcribed here:

From my mom:
“So I asked Matt to bring up some toilet paper to put the toilet paper away–it was a big pack. Well, we didn’t hear from him for several hours. We went upstairs and the toilet paper was hanging out everywhere–out the shelves, on the floor, everywhere–thanks Matt! Great job!

When transcribed into words on a page, this story loses quite a bit of flavor. Perhaps if this publication were meant to turn into a collective memory jar/story album, than perhaps it would mean more, but it lay a little flat as was.

From my dad:

“I remember when the Wendy’s ritual first started. It was right around the time when Matthew started school at Chartwell. He never dealt well with change. I guess most people don’t. He developed a particularly funny coping mechanism.”

“I dropped Matthew off at school one mornign on my way to work, and he was in a particularly bad mood that day. Just gettng to cross over the bridge to the West Bank, my phone rang, and it was Chartwell. They were calling me to let me know that Matthew was–well, he was really throwing a fit. [I] turned around, went to pick him up. A couple of minutes into the drive home, he started demanding that we stop at Wendy’s. [My dad sighs.] We pull into the drivethrough, and he always has a particular order: one value fry, one bowl of chili, one natural lemonade, a junior chocolate frosty, two packs of ketchup, and one pack of hot sauce.”

“Once we make the drive back to the house, Matthew gets a ciramic bowl, dumps the chili in it, and then leaves the whole thing untouched. I thought that would just be a one off experience.”

“But then it happened again.”

“And again.”

“It’s funny–it was like an offering to make sure the house still remained [laughs] when he was at school. Matthew was always worried that things would not continues to exist if he didn’t personally watch over them.”

“Sometimes, I run into people who have kids with autism. Sometimes I will be excited, like–hey yeah! Your son or daughter has autism too, right? But here’s the thing. It’s so different. Some kids can talk and go to school just fine–others, like Matthew, are a little less socially functional. If you know one kid with autism, you know one kid with autism.”

This is the story that my dad told to narrate the animation I did about my brother’s anxieties in 2017. We collaborated a bit on the writing, but because it was for a fuller project, it has a fuller arc.

I also got a story from my friend Jenny:

“Hi Brooke! So I want to tell you about a time a few years ago when my brother gave me one of the best presents I will ever receive. I still call him my little brother, even though he’s 28 now and is a good foot taller than me. He’s a very kind soul, very loving (although he wasn’t always so nice to me – when we were wee he used to tell me “you can go now” a few seconds after I stepped into the room…!). He has always loved cartoons, and has become really good at drawing and painting them over the years. He spends hours making amazing gifts for birthdays, Christmas presents, anniversaries, Easter, and as his only sister I have been privileged to receive many items over the years that I would consider among his best works! I’ve had beautifully drawn cards, painted pictures of my favourite cartoons that we have watched together to hang on my walls, a completely handmade 100 piece jigsaw puzzle complete with box, an advent calendar constructed out of cereal boxes, and many more. While they are all very precious to me, there’s one gift in particular that I will always display proudly. For my 25th birthday, he made me a photo frame. The design is an original one, complete with a unique folding mechanism using paperclips to create a hinge. It’s got a picture of Princess Peach, my favoured Mario Kart candidate, laminated and attached to the top of the frame. My favourite part of the whole design is the construction material. As it turned out, I turned 25 in the same year that Magnum ice creams were celebrating their 25th anniversary with promotional packaging, including using ice cream sticks with the number 25 on them. My brother selflessly consumed no less than 32 of these promotional ice creams in order to have enough ice cream sticks to construct my photo frame. Bear in mind that the promotional packs were in the shops a good 8 months before my birthday – he planned this long in advance and kept hold of the sticks all that time. Quoth my dad when I opened it – “we wondered why he was eating so much ice cream!”. Topped off with an excellent choice of photo – the two of us at my graduation – the photo frame puts a smile on my face every time I look at it. I feel lucky to have a brother so thoughtful.”

I love this story, but I thought it might be a bit tricky to illustrate because the visualizations of the words of the story are half of the fun. In this case, I thought that illustration could in fact take away.

In my attempts to collect stories, I started to notice that they all worked really well as spoken anecdotes, but when written down, they didn’t have the same sparkle. Nonetheless, I continued to visually illustrate not one story, but what living with Matthew in New Orleans is like in order that it can fit multiple stories. The difference with these prints is that I am now using the figure.

I use the pictures that I took over the break in order to give a peak into the life of Matthew. Additionally, I have been playing with larger compositions in these sort of comic book prints, as the figure sort of adds a narrative automatically.

I like how striking these graphic images are–how they look like dollhouses. However, the inconsistencies in my prints are a little distracting, so I will have to solve this.

Compiling Research from the Break

The holiday break was an important period to recharge, but also to compile some material for the zine that I hope to create for this realize project.

I spent a lot of time talking to my parents, siblings, and friends in the community about their stories and interactions with people on the spectrum. In particular, talking to my parents about the issue was enlightening. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on their perspective, but one thing that my mom brought to my attention was the issue that started off these investigations: permanent housing. My brother has gone through many different phases where he has been entranced by one thing or another. The phobia of losing the house and car because of a slightly atypical understanding of object permanence was what I was exploring in Investigate. There is a possibility that I found this interesting because it had a clear narrative arc, with an origin story of Katrina and the resolution of a permanence of family. However, the unceartantiy of spaces is something that is pressing in the ageing community of people on the spectrum, particularly in Louisiana, our home town.

There isn’t a lot of infrastructure in place for nonverbal people on the autism spectrum in New Orleans. In fact, throughout my childhood, my family struggled to find a place where my brother could go to school. Because New Orleans’ school system is mainly made up of charter schools which are privately run and publicly funded, they get ‘to choose’ to an extent the type of childrent that they will admit. And, not all schools have to provide programs for children with severe special needs. After a lot of shuffling, and after my broher was kicked out of a lot of schools that were mainly geared to provide services for people with Down Syndrome, my parents found a school. However, they have to pay out of their own pocket for my brother to go there.

Now, he is 21, and past classic school years. But, he will never be able to live on his own. So my parents were discussing the possibility of going in with some other parents in order to create some sort of fund to start a house for the ‘harder’ populations of people with autism. This sort of gave some traction to why I want to tell and illustrate these stories.

There is a lack of resources and a lack of uncertainly for a lot of people like my brother. There is also a lot of guilt for siblings and parents who know that they can’t necessarily take care of one of these individuals on their own forever. Ultimately, I am hoping that a publication like this, or some of the stories and illustrations could serve as a means to raise awareness for these issues.

I also spent a lot of time with my brother. I asked him to draw a couple of things for the zine, to which he responded with a couple of doodles. He goes through different phases where he will draw a lot or a little. There is evidence of the period where he did draw all over our house, though, so I took some images from there.

The images are a little bit coded. I don’t know what all of them refer to, but for a while, it seemed like he just liked holding a pen in his hand. Though there is some evidence that he draws from observation. The squares in the last panel look like windows. To me, it is a little like looking at the frequencies crisscrossing in his brain. All of the marks refer to something, but I just don’t have the ability to decode all of them.

I also took a lot of pictures of Matthew in his natural environment: his room.

I took pictures in the moments of calm and breakdown.

I also had my mom take pictures when he made us laugh.

Overall, this time at home was a good reminder of why exactly it is important to tell this and other stories similar to my own. And, it made me grapple with the ways that I could incorporate Matthew’s voice as well as those of the people who talk about him in a way that happens to be accessible to me.

Feedback and Timetable

On Friday, after we made our elevator pitches, our peers provided feedback via post-it notes. This was incredibly helpful because we got a lot of rapid, honest feedback for our work. Creating an elevator pitch was a useful exercise in and of itself because it allowed me to hone in my ideas from investigate to communicate my plan clearly, and that justification is at the core of being a visual communicator.

By and large, my feedback was positive, but the kicker question was ‘so what?’ why would an audience care about these stories. I think my goal is to create something for the hyper-invested community: people who have siblings with autism who can relate. Too, I think the stories could provide a window of understanding into the complexity and individuality of atypical minds in general.

Even though I have a somewhat clear overall vision, the nuts and bolts will require a lot of planning. Essentially what I am doing is creating a snazzy scrapbook of stories and images, but that means a lot of sourcing for stories as well as a lot of time to plan on the back end for a nice assembly of the publication as a whole.

Realise: Creating a Statement of Intent

In order to prepare for my elevator pitch presentation that I was to make on Thursday for the Realise project, I created a draft of my a1 sheet of paper.

Ultimately, I knew I wanted to create a publication, but before I could commit the idea to a piece of paper, I had to go through a draft.

Realise: Project Launch

On the Monday before the break, we launched Realise, the purpose of which is to distill one of our investigations from the previous project into a finished body of work. Not only does this involve assessing the work from Investigate to find what our most ‘successful’ pieces were, but also it will involve finding the work that we can best fully actualize in a form.

Here the distinguishing factor of being a visual communicator is paramount, as we are to identify a social and political context for our work as well as an audience. I definitely have a social political context in mind, communities of those who are on the spectrum or are related to people on the spectrum, and I definitely want to tell those stories. It is just a matter of narrowing and hyper-focusing this aim.

For me, after the Investigate project, I got a lot of different feedback for what my work could become based on my digital illustrations, children’s book style illustrations, and linocuts. Isabel suggested that perhaps what could come out of the project could ultimately be a workshop for people on the spectrum, if the goal is ultimately to educate in a sense.

However, I am more interested in the visual aspect according to what I think I can actually accomplish in this particular time table. Ultimately, I was more attracted to the potential impact of a children’s book about people on the spectrum. Talking to peers, I realized, though, that my perspective isn’t as justified to talk to children, even if I have a basic story-line in mind. I don’t have kids at this point in time, and I don’t interact with little ones here in London.

However, I am knowledgeable about my own age demographic, to an extent, in rapidly adapting discourse about disability and mental health. Too, from my work, people reponded most strongly to my linocuts of the house as a visual. Combined, I have found my aesthetic: graphic linocuts (black and white); my audence: people my age (specifically sisters of people on the spectrum and high functioning people on the spectrum); and my subject: stories of particular individuals with autism.

With all of this in mind, I think the most logical and feasible final outcome will be a zine, which will be somewhat of a collage of these stories. Ultimately, the zine will be more of a poetic art book, but hopefully it can educate as well.

Where it will go and who will read it are certainly questions that I need to address, but I think this is the jumping off point from the investigate project.