Now Featuring Jessica Higgins

Artist and publisher Jessica Higgins has a practice strongly rooted in collage. Creating images that which reference fanzine culture, vintage books and textile crafts, she melts disparate DIY practices into elegant, witty images.

Exclusive Print 1, Room With Views

Exclusive Print 2, Happy House

Exclusive Print 3, Far In

Exclusive Print 4, You're a Jay Walker

Exclusive Print 5, Coat and Arms

MH: Can you tell me about your relationship with paper and books?  It seems like such a strong thread in your work.  Much of your work is collage and I know you both collect books and make books.

JH: I’m not really sure where it came from; I guess I grew up with a lot of books in the house, and my dad was really into comics and graphic novels. He also used to make fanzines when he was in college and university, which he didn’t even tell me about until I’d started making my own zines! It was really great to dig all his boxes of zines out from the cellar, he has maybe a thousand, most of which have now been donated to Salford Zine Library. The first bit of proper “work” I actually made was an animation I made when I was thirteen, then I started making these stupid comics when I was bored in science lessons. Then I got really interested in collage; I started collecting weird pictures you’d find in old magazines and books from charity shops. When I started making work more solidly, mostly drawing work, it kind of made sense to turn it into zines. It’s a way to document what I’m doing and collect my sets of works in one place. I think that print can really transform a piece, whether you’ve photocopied it and flattened out the colors, or made totally black and white work and copy it onto colored paper. I’ve never been into making big paintings and if I did I wouldn’t know what to do with them, but small pieces really get put on a pedestal when you put them in books. It’s a way to keep motivated maybe, like having a blog or something. When you’re not making work for any other reason than yourself, the zines give a little bit of purpose to the work.

Huge Appetite

Ease

MH: How long have you been doing Museums Press?  Do you have collaborators?

JH: I started Museums Press in June 2009. The idea with Museums One was to make a zine which was literally to collect peoples work in a photocopied and staple bound book, but then as I started working on it and accumulating more parts it became another elaborate box set! Since then we’ve done a couple more of those type of releases and probably will ever so often, they take a LOT of work though, I like to think of them as what makes us special. Since Matt joined last summer, we’ve been focusing on regular releases and really simple single artist books or zines. We now have the Small Press that helps us to maintain a bit of discipline!  We collaborate a lot of the time on releases and exhibitions and things, we’re lucky to have a really great community of people. Our friends who release tapes and records called Comfortable on a Tightrope curated a really amazing tape to go with the first Museums release, and Salford Zine Library and Good Grief! (a zine and small press shop), have been collaborators on exhibitions and things too. Hopefully we’ll be just as blessed when we relocate to Glasgow!

No More Headaches

Untitled

MH: Can you talk about the kind of folk-art style imagery you’ve been using in some of your more recent collages, which is reminiscent of textile patterns.  It’s quite a contrast to some of your text-based work (which, correct me if I’m wrong, are often produced for zines).

JH: I’m interested in motifs and patterns within my work, and the textile patterns are something I’d always seen growing up; my mum makes patchwork quilts and taught me how to sew when I was really young. I saw Clare Rojas’ work about a year ago, and it’s like something clicked! I get a lot of inspiration from her work. Drawing the patterns and using them makes a lot of sense to me. I think part of the reason I like it is because I can make things fit together, I can see how one square or triangle sits next to the other, because it’s how I would sew them or how they would work in a grid. I like things to be simple and straightforward, and achievable from very few processes or a small set of rules. It always has the best outcome. My most recent work has taken a bit of a collage based direction, the idea of using solid colors produced by colored card or paper is something I read in a Josef Albers book called the Interaction of Color and it’s in my head a lot. The text based work is something I’ve shied away from recently; I still like to incorporate text and sometimes I feel like I have two or three different styles, I just haven’t worked out how to make them come together yet!

X Y Newfoundland

MH: I understand you’ll be starting a sculpture degree at Glasgow School of Art soon (congrats, it’s an amazing school!).  Would you talk about your sculpture work?  It’s something different than what I’ve turned up in my research of your work.

JH: Thanks! I’ve never really made any sculpture, actually, although I’ve had a few ideas! Especially for installations. The work on my website is no more than a year old really, and I’ve only been able to be make 2D work for a long time. I’m excited to have the chance to explore other media in a better, more focused environment than my bedroom or living room! The course is pretty much just a contemporary art course, and public art and performance are quite a big thing in it. A couple of years ago I was making these newspapers about people’s good news, and I’m interested in a lot of conceptual and public participatory based art works, Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More was a big thing for me. I’ve also been interested in making films for a long time, I invested in a lot of equipment to make super eight films with good intention, but they never came to form. I’m excited to see what my work will be like while I’m doing my degree —whether the last couple of years working solely on visual art and print will be a help or a hindrance!

MH: Can you talk about your collaborations with Matt?  Is it just Museums Press or do you do other projects?

JH: Museums Press takes up a LOT of our time, but through that, we end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t directly relate to publishing zines! We’ve had some design projects for friends or through friends, as a result of laying out books all the time. It’s a nice opportunity to be more creative and work together outside of the Museums Press “rules.” We’ve also recently collaborated with Mason McFee and Jessica Clark on one of their Crummy House (Austin, Texas based) zines. They do really great things with mixing collaging and design! We also did a Victor and Hester (Glasgow based publisher) journal not long ago, and any time one of us makes a personal zine, the other does, and so we often work together to find a format or style to put the two together. Outside of zines, we’ve worked together on an a piece for a group show for the Working Class Movement Library & Islington Mill here in Salford. We took all of our favorite things and collections and photocopied them before cutting out shapes and making this sprawling photocopied corner of a wall. It was nice. We also collaborate on making dinner every night, which is probably the highlight of our creative careers so far.

MH: Also, you mentioned Josef Albers great book, the Interaction of Color... where else do you get inspiration?  What (and who) else are you looking at?

JH: We’re always looking at stuff for Museums and finding great new artists, so I feel like I’m always appreciating and being inspired by the people that we work with. Even though my work has strayed pretty solidly into the land of shapes, I’m really into hand painted signs and lettering, we recently bought our friend the Ed Ruscha book “They Called Her Styrene” for her birthday, and I wish we’d kept it for ourselves! It’s 600 pages and every image is perfect; they’re all just words and phrases but the backgrounds and the all of the different lettering he used are really nice. We saw a book by a Glasgow-based artist Ross Sinclair called “Real Life” which is a collection of his projects in which the phrase “Real Life” appears in each installation, painting, t-shirt or tattoo. The best thing I’ve seen in a long time though, is an installation called “Attention” by Corin Sworn, Nicolas Party and Ciara Phillips at the GoMA; it’s like a wall of screenprinted posters, it really reminded my of Sister Corita Kent’s work, who is also a big inspiration!