Getting creative with Off Cuts at the Tate: a weekend well spent!

Last weekend we were at Tate Modern running a two-day zine-making workshop with our friends Zine Swap and Patrick Fry for Hyperlink festival. Thanks to everyone who came down to say hi and got stuck into making zines. We were bowled over by how many visitors we had – over 2000 people visited us in the Tate Tanks Transformer Gallery 2 and a couple of hundred of those made a zine. 

If you’ve been to the Tanks or seen photos you’ll know how raw the gallery space is; cavernous rooms that resemble concrete bunkers yet are somehow very beautiful. It turned out to be a great environment to transform into a studio space. We embraced the starkness, got in some photocopiers and erected some chipboard shelving, which we filled with the Zine Swap archive for inspiration. Over the course of the two days our second shelving unit was filled up by copies of the zines being made; it was great to see the collection grow and the sheer array of stories being told by people with tons of design experience to complete novices, young and old. There were zines on shame, love and football to politics, beards, Angela Lansbury and broken legs. 

We were thrilled to have been invited along by Tate Collectives to be part of the event. It was great to see that Hyperlink attracted a much wider audience than just the usual art crowd and aimed to engage people in an innovative way. We saw lots of people playing, making a mess and being creative, be that in Rankin’s photography sessions, Morag Myerscough’s illustration workshop, Abberant architecture’s space, or in the numerous performances across the weekend. Well done Tate!

Check out more of the photos on our facebook page