What to Expect

Make a zine with artist and educator Victoria Cooper (assisted by Doug Spowart). To explore concepts of montage and collage in storytelling, participants will work with found printed images from magazines and old books to create an A3 sized photo collage.

Participants will experiment with different ways of presenting the constructed narrative as a photobook; the work will be photocopied and folded into artists’ book forms. These may include: eight-page fold, snake books, concertina, three-hole pamphlet stitch.

Some materials provided.

What to bring

• Bring your own printed material to work with (if using)
• A snack and water bottle

Learning Outcomes

• At the end of the workshop, students will be able to:
• Apply basic storytelling techniques to projects.
• Collage found material into a meaningful narrative.
• Experiment with constructing a photobook or zine by hand.
• Bind their own zines using folds and binding techniques learned in the workshop.

About Your Teachers

Victoria Cooper PhD is a visual artist and educator. During the last 30 years she has maintained a creative practice in photography and artists books with exhibitions, awards and community projects. In academic research, Cooper explored montage and collage in the construction of visual narratives of Place. Cooper was a Siganto Foundation Research Fellow at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) to research montage and collage. Cooper’s work has been purchased by significant rare book collections including: the British Library, National Library of Australia and the Australian Library of Art (SLQ), Artspace Mackay and the State Library of Victoria.

Dr Doug Spowart has for over 50 years collected photographically illustrated books and in 2012 completed a PhD on the topic of self-publishing in the digital age. He has extensively researched, judged and commentated on the photobook in Australia and New Zealand.

Doug has published 3 volumes of the COMPENDIUM of Australian & New Zealand Photobooks and also is content producer for The Antipodean Photobook Blog where he promotes internationally activities, events and publications emerging from our local region.

In 2019 he coordinated the Photobook Weekend events at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.