Very excited to attend the opening night of this new show at The Mill Gallery in Leeds yesterday evening. The exhibition showcases the world of zines and I was very pleased to have my bookwork ‘Farnley from above Oltey (After Mr Turner)’ selected to be part of the exhibition.

The event is presented by Aire Place Studios in collaboration with Zineophelia, which is run by my fellow PhD candidate at Leeds Beckett, Nick Shearon. According to the exhibition blurb (and I think these might be Nick’s words):

The exhibition brings together artists working across zines, comics, illustration, and print to explore how images can twist, stretch, and fold our sense of what’s real.

Zines are an impermanent medium, made to be shared, passed on, and remade. To complete their full definition, they must be disseminated; they are not just publications but acts of communication. The culture comes first, and zines follow. Folded Realities is a snapshot of that culture: zines frozen in time, communicating live en masse. This exhibition becomes a kind of time capsule, a report on where zine culture stands right now, where it has come from, and where it’s heading next.

From hand-drawn narratives and experimental sequences to bold, graphic storytelling, each piece invites viewers to step into a different perspective, where humour meets politics, abstraction meets emotion, and reality blurs into invention.

Some really interesting pieces on show and very varied. I really do like the collage in some of these works and those that take a really simple approach based on drawing and text. Plenty of food for thought and I’m sure I’l be making much more use of this art form in my own practice.

The exhibition runs from 14 November to 12 December.

Thanks to @paulabraham10 for the exhibition photo.