Zine Making Workshop

Museum of Everyone (MOE) Communal – The Art of Coexistence

A Zine Making Workshop – Projecting Sea Creature Consciousness onto the Moon: a speculative flash fiction writing and zine making workshop led by writer, Jess Raymon and visual artist, Sarah Edmondson. 

This event is free but booking is required, visit our Eventbrite page to book.

The workshop will take place in Nuns Island as part of MOE Communal’s residency programme at Galway Arts Centre. The workshop is divided into two parts. In the first part the participants will be guided through a series of writing techniques to develop their storytelling, creating an individual flash fiction embodying a sea creature within a community, guided by Jess Raymon. In the second part of the workshop the participants will transform their stories into visual zines, using art-making techniques informed by Sarah Edmondson’s practice, including drawing and collage, and using scanners and photocopiers to create textures and layers. The zines created during this workshop will be compiled to create a limited edition collection as part of MOE Communal. 

This workshop is suitable for artists with a practice that responds to environmental and societal matters (including visual artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, etc.). 

Are you sick of human beings hogging up the moon with their desires, needs and fears? Join us and participate in a workshop that de-centralises the human experience from the moon, returning it to a blank slate and considering what it means to us as a community of shoreline creatures. 

The moon is our satellite, and has served as our canvas, a space for human beings to project desires, longings, needs and fears. Poets, filmmakers, visual artists and storytellers, use and have used the moon to express themselves. Enough of us humans colonising the moon with our wills and needs. In this workshop, we will strip the moon of the human ego, forget every word Elon Musk has ever said, and look at the moon from the perspective of a small community of shore creatures in Ireland. We are going to reimage the moon, from a non-human perspective. 

We will do this by first immersing ourselves in the world of mollusks, crabs and worms living in the sand and rocks. Here lies lugworms spending their days eating and defecating sand, mollusks filtering water for nutrients, crabs digging protection, and prickly cockles using their bright fuschia tongues to leap out of the water. 

What does being in the bodies of these creatures do to us? What does it allow us to see or feel? What new concerns do we have? What doesn’t matter anymore? You will choose and immerse yourself into the world of one creature through a writing exercise. Participants will be encouraged to be imaginative and consider the consciousness of non-human creatures. Afterwards we will discuss our creatures and get to know some common concerns, hopes, fears, dreams and wishes in our community. Our findings here will anchor and guide us as we consider how to project our new communities’ sentiments and experiences onto the lunar canvas. 

We will then explore and experiment with drawing techniques and mixed materials; combining images with text to create visual zines. These zines will later be packaged and compiled to create a collaborative, limited edition, lo-fi collection. 

Sarah Edmondson is an interdisciplinary artist, museum and gallery educator, lecturer at NCAD, and studio member at MART, Dublin. Her work is informed by her dual role as an artist and cross-generational art educator, critically analysing her supposed position of expert power in different contexts and communities. She is interested in the evolution of knowledge and the role iconic images from the history of art and the media have on our understanding of interpersonal relationships and the natural world; using a variety of mediums to playfully challenge anthropocentric views. To date, she has successfully created staged photographs in response to archival ephemera, pseudoscientific zines, moving images and video installations. The writings of Donna Haraway, Sophia Al-Maria and Hito Steyerl inform her practice. Sarah is also part of the collective MIDDEN alongside Mary Martin and Niamh McGuinne. Exhibitions in 2022 included; ‘MIDDEN’, Luan Gallery, Athlone; ‘Through Light and Shade’, Alalimón Galeria, Barcelona; and ‘Gormworm’, TaKt, Berlin. Sarah has recently completed a residency at IMMA with the Museum of Everyone’s Communal project and is a MOE Associate Artist. 

Jess Raymon writes fiction. She is currently working on a psychological horror novel set at a seaside fertility clinic, haunted by sea creatures and bodies that contain moons. Her work has been published in Winter Papers, Crannog, From the Well anthology and she has received Irish Arts Council bursaries as well as awards from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her story Latch won the 2023 Cuirt short story award.

This event is supported by the Creative Communities Award,  Creative Ireland Programme 2023, Galway City Council, Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.