Helena came back from visiting the Vagina Museum in London and showed me lots of pictures from the exhibitions. this started a lot of conversation about being a woman and our experiences, and then I think it took me saying that I wanted to bring more meaning into my work through feminism, and before I knew it we were having ideas for a feminist zine about periods.
We came up with a list of things that most women might go through while they are on there period, and then decided we would draw each of them together on Magma. Magma is a website where you and your friends can draw on the same digital canvas at the same time. It was fun and interesting to use because where I am quite proficient with digital draw, Helena had never done it before. We spent about an hour per drawing and added a little phrase to each of them, we also planned to have the colours be the colours of the blood during a period cycle. We also added black out poetry to the beginning and ends because we had some in reserve that were very feminist.
When making the book, I wanted to bind them by hand and then somehow we came up with the idea of having the excess thread on the outside of the book, so that it would look like tampon string. We also went a step further and used red acrylic mixed in water to dye the ends of the string, just so that it was even easier to tell what it was.
I think the zine is quite graphic but we weren't afraid of that and you can't really talk about periods without being graphic about it. Also we want people to not tread around the subject.
I really like the outcome of the zine and we have got a lot of positive feedback on it. Some women being like "yeah that's so real!". And that's really all we could ask for to be honest.
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