Owt Creative are a design collective based in Manchester, they operate as a studio, sine publisher and event producers. The collective is made up of Ste Beed, Jon Hannan, Ben Kither and Sarah Stapleton, all graduates from the Manchester School of Art. This week saw the second in a series of talks organised by OWT featuring talks from emerging and established practitioners. The event aimed to bring knowledge into the North West whilst also sharing existing, emerging talent which already exists here. The speakers were asked to discuss notions of process, audience and inspirations but OWT described it more as a pub chat! They said that the materials generated on the evening along with submissions inspired by the talks will provide the framework, determine the format and influence the art direction of the new OWT publication.
The evening was compered by Gemma Germains of Well Made Studio based in Liverpool. It began with Alex Zamore of Intern Magazine.
Alec Dudson
Alec spoke about how he travelled from city to city following the biennials and began to research how people who had lived in these places viewed their cities. Alec aimed to make a travel guide from his research but not for your average tourist. Whilst travelling around Alec had various internships but never got offered a job through any of them. He became very interested in creating a magazine/publication but had no idea where to start in such a saturated market. Alec kept thinking about all of the internships he had taken and decided that not enough people were talking about internships or to them about what they were doing. And so his magazine “Intern - Meet the talent - Join the debate” developed from these thoughts. Alec used Kickstarter to fundraise for the magazine, he remarked that it’s very hard to get people involved in a project without having something to show them.
Alec looked at what makes a valuable internship. His views are very different about interning compared to those in the magazine, he believes he needs to be impartial and unbiased. Alec’s views are very subjective as he experienced many internships where he would look forward to starting and end up doing lots of admin work, with no real practice involved in the projects to help develop his skills and pass on any that he had. Real work = Best experience.
Alex Zamora
Alex Zamora describes himself as a Community lead / social strategist @PokeLondon, also a freelancer, a guest lecturer in various places, and runs Fanzines for fun! Alex left Liverpool over 11 years ago as he felt there were no jobs there for him, and so made his way down to London. Alex championed North West designers as he felt that they were massively underrepresented. One of his aims is to get North West Creatives coverage as he believes there is a high level of talent here that’s not talked about, particularly those who have graduated from LJMU and MMU and he believes when you are in such as a position as himself it is your duty to help others too. One of the projects Alex set up was a Facebook group running up to the elections in 2010 asking people to join who weren’t going to vote for David Cameron.
Alex has a passion for zines, he says there is no proper way to make a zine, you have to go about it in your own way and experiment. Alex started up his own zine, Feverzine with the first one being published in 2007.He regularly visit zine fares, although there has been no real zine scene in the Uk for the past 3 years. He referenced Zolt Zine as a Alex has over 2000 zines in his collection. During his talk ALex also discussed students portfolios, he said that awards don’t stand out in student portfolios anymore as so many students have them. People are more interested in personal led project and being initiative in your own work as this usually stands out from all other portfolios and shows that you have interests in your own things.
Lé Gun
Lé Gun are a London based collective of illustrators and designers who have put together the Lé Gun Magazine and are also well known for their enigmatic installations and art shows. Gun Illustrator, Neal Fox came to talk about the collective, he said earlier on whilst studying he worked in fine art but was influenced by comic art, of which he gave various examples! The collective would organise collaborative parties in bars where they would all draw together with the aim of raising money to fund the first issue of the magazine. Neal quoted André Breton with - “The man who can’t imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”. The collective have made several collaborative drawings together where the 5 of them will work on a piece at one time. Some of the most inspiring pieces for me were the walk in drawings where they translated a 2D drawing of a room into a 3D drawn replica of the 2D drawn room (See below). They were also lucky enough to be given an old shoe shop in London for free use for a short period of time to do with as they pleased. In the space they created an animation for Babyshambles’ song - French Dog Blues .
The talks from the evening can be watched on the OWT Discourse site here.
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