Month: September 2011

An Audience With…Esther From Overheard-Drawn

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We found Esther’s mini zine, Overheard-drawn recently at Vic, which was a very happy surprise! Obviously we think visiting our zine collection is the best way to get your zine fix, but second to that is randomly finding free zines around the place. Anyway, Carla recently spoke to Esther about the inspiration behind Overheard-drawn, so keep reading if you want to know more…

overheard coverHi Esther! Your zine is really cool, I like the fact that it feels a bit teen like and is really amusing. How did you come up with the idea of making “overheard-drawn”? Is it your first zine?

Oh thank you. I wanted it to be a bit fun and amusing. It is my first zine and the idea came from a previous studio project which i wanted to re-do. Using the zine format seemed a lot more appropriate for the subject matter of which I was drawing things I overheard and integrating them with the text of the quotes.

How and why did you choose the theme for “overheard-drawn”?

The idea started with eavesdropping and the random parts of sentences that you hear that are a lot of the time nonsense and amusing, and I wanted to illustrate those parts. With the zine I used the Victoria University’s overheard @ vic Facebook page to get the quotes and illustrated the ones that stood out to me, and half of them appeared in the next weeks Salient ‘overheard’ section as well. Using the quotes from Vic meant that I distributed the zine there too and when I get the time the 2nd edition will be put out there too! I’m planning to have a ‘do it yourself’ section in the next one so that people can have space to illustrate what they have ‘overheard’ and then leave for others to find. Continue reading “An Audience With…Esther From Overheard-Drawn” →

Gordon Crook 1921 – 2011

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Gordon Crook was born in England, and taught textile design at London’s Central School of Art. He came to New Zealand in 1972, where his art flourished. In 1979 he was commisioned to create 20 enormous banners for the New Zealand embassy in Washington, and a few years later made the banners that still hang in the entrance of the Michael Fowler Centre. In the decades that followed, his art – textiles, prints, paintings and collages – was exhibited throughout the country. Te Papa, who own some of his works, has a more detailed biography online here.

We hold a number of items that relate to Gordon Crook:

Gordon Crook : A Life of Art, is a a documentary from 2011 that looks at his life and his art. I personally recommend it.
Gordon Crook [Kaleidoscope]; this is a recording on VHS of the 1987 Kaleid0scope episode about his life, art, and philosophy.
Catelogue of an Exhibition of Tapestries and Drawings Based on the Theme of Adam and Eve (1978). Reference copy only.
Gordon Crook, by the Brooker Gallery. This was published in 1993, and is only 62 pages long, but is a very good collection of biographical articles and reproductions of Crook’s work.

Gordon Crook passed away on the 26th of August. In addition to being one of Wellington’s best artists, he was also a regular library user. He came in daily and was a friend to many library staff members; he will be sorely missed.

An Audience With… Alex Papanastasiou

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Alex is the author of the zine Her Suit (see our review here). We had the chance recently to interview her about her zine and her life.

Hi Alex! Thank you so much for letting us interview you. After talking to you in person I noticed that you’ve got a very international accent, where do you come from originally?

My mum’s from Australia and my dad’s from Cyprus and I hold both passports. I don’t really feel like either place is home though. I’ve moved around a lot. I’ve lived in Sydney, Jakarta, Cairo, Singapore, Dunedin,  Melbourne and Wellington. I went to international schools and I think that gave me a bit of an American twang, too.

You mentioned you lived in Jakarta, how do you think this experience shaped you? Do you feel a special connection to Jakarta? Why?

Well, the expatriate community kept quite separate from the local community, so even though I was there for eight years I still feel like I never really got to know Jakarta. Living there made me very aware of my material privilege. There was a lot of poverty.

Continue reading “An Audience With… Alex Papanastasiou” →