Alt.Cardiff Magazine: The Zines Of Change Issue

January 2024 / Issue 1

alt.cardiff

The Zines Of Change Issue

How a little creative flair can help to transform the

hospitality industry Welcome to the inaugral Cardiff Zine Fest

Interview: Shaking up your career when things go stale

Tabletop games putting food on the table

News

The inaugral Cardiff Zine Fest

A few of the zines celebrated at Cardiff Zine Fest

The first-of-its-kind festival aims to rival other UK cities’ similar events Tabletop to tabletop

Tommy Boyd Visitors to Chapter

Arts Centre will experience Cardiff’s first ever celebration of zine culture as well as an education in zine making on 18 November.

According to the festival organisers, Shelf Life Books and Zines, and ArtHole, more than 30 illustrators and zine makers will descend on the centre.

The creatives and vendors being staged at the zine fest are drawn from Cardiff, south Wales, and beyond.

“We’re going to do workshops, and answer the question ‘What’s a zine?’ maybe 17,000 times,” says Rosie Smith, the owner of Shelf Life.

These workshops will include a session introducing zines to anyone looking to give zine making a go, and one focused specifically on comics.

There will also be a communal table for anyone wishing to sell their zines.

The owners of ArtHole and Shelf Life say there will be a lot of illustrators and artists who have turned to the zine format as a way of getting their artwork out.

They add that there’s not many places in the city where you can buy zines so this provides an opportunity to would-be buyers and sellers.

The inspiration to put on the zine fest came over the Summer as they sought to connect with the pre-existing, network of zine fests across the UK. They had been to similar festivals all over the country, including Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Brighton, Swansea, and plenty in London, but they had never attended an official “Cardiff Zine Fest.”

“Zine fests are how you find out about most zine people so if we can get it rolling as an annual thing it would be really cool and put it on the zine map,” Rosie explains.

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A charity tabletop game tournament has raised over £600 for Welsh food banks four years after the first competition – and organisers expect this will now be an annual event.

FoodBowl 2 is organised by Mohammed Javaid who hopes to run the competition annually in future.

On 18 and 19 November 2023 the tournament was held at Firestorm Games, where participants competed at Blood Bowl, a board game that parodies American football, but is set in the fantasy world of Warhammer.

“The nice thing is that with this community people aren’t fighting for prize money or anything. If you ask

Participants raised at least £660 for Welsh foodbanks

Women on the living wage

Women have directly benefitted from Cardiff’s status as a Living Wage City, according to academics.

Deborah Hann, pro-dean for Education and Students at Cardiff Business School, recently delivered the positive findings.

Research found that women formed a majority of those who saw increased wages from the scheme, in part due to their likelihood to work in part-time, poorly paid jobs.

Interview

Sara Moorhouse How to shake up your career when things go stale At 29 Sara moved to Cardiff to retrain as a ceramicist, where she still lives and works.

It was there on a master’s course in ceramics that she first heard the question posed to all students working out if they felt comfortable in the art practice they were undertaking: “Are you feeling that?”

This question could have been asked to Moorhouse at many points along the road to the artist she is today. Her journey afterwards was far from straightforward. Despite harbouring a love for ceramics, she turned away towards illustration during her first year at Wolverhampton University, focusing on children’s books.

“I was 19, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was confused,” she explains as she struggled to decide on an artistic specialism.

Moorhouse decided against the competitive world of children’s illustrations, following her undergraduate degree, and instead turned to teaching art where chance found her back in the arms of ceramics. Teaching kids, however, became too repetitive after six years in the job.

Quitting her job, Moorhouse Sara specialises in making colourful, banded bowls that are connected to the found herself at a crossroads landscape and the seasons when a stroke of chance revealed itself.

Her sister was moving to Cardiff to study a postgraduate degree in Theatre Design and told her to ring Cardiff University and see if they had a ceramics course. So she did, and was told to attend an interview the following week. Moorhouse began Even when finally reunited with ceramics, however, she a master’s in 2003: “It was struggled to find a home for herself within it. very serendipitous; it felt just She initially manipulated the shape, balance and structure of right.” ceramics by throwing bowls on a potter’s wheel, then cutting them up and putting them back together in different ways.

Sara’s tips for new “Are you feeling that?” ceramacists: “Not really, no.”

1. There are plenty of courses So Moorhouse pivoted to utilising colour and the banding of available in Cardiff and bowls in ways influenced by landscapes and how they change elsewhere, especially since The with the seasons. Her first collection, Arable Landscape, was Great Pottery Throwdown first based upon the gently rolling hills and fields of her home aired on TV in 2015 county, Nottinghamshire, and the way that light affected the 2. Airdry clay does not need a perception of the landscape. The Worksop native continued to kiln so you can craft ceramics develop Arable Landscape throughout her PhD and into her from almost anywhere now 18-year-long residency at Fireworks Clay Studios where 3. YouTube is a brilliant resource she will showcase pieces as part of their Winter Open Day for tutorials, tips and tricks next month.

4. “You don’t need a degree to be Sat on a stool among her collections inspired by diverse a ceramicist, but you need time regions like the cliffs of West Wales, the mountains of and practice. Just give it a go Switzerland, and even the surface of Saturn, Sara Moorhouse and get your hands dirty!” is an artist finally at home.

“Are you feeling that?”

Credit: Unsplash

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Zines of change

How creativity can transform the lives of hospitality workers

T

he cost-of-living crisis does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Its causes and instigating factors are diverse and numerous, but although analyses of these factors can be interesting in their approach and findings, it does not particularly matter in the long-term if solutions to the ongoing crisis are not concocted at the same time alongside them.

One possible solution offered to the rapidly declining standard or living for swathes of the working population as prices soar is the creation of stronger, nation-wide trade unions and subsequently better bargaining power for their members. As the country experiences unfaltering strike action from across industries with historically strong unions such as rail and health services, how could an underrepresented and precarious sector like hospitality join in on the struggle for improved wages, contracts and working conditions?

How poor are wages for hospitality workers?

The situation regarding wages in hospitality remains bleak. In a 2023 survey of hospitality workers conducted by the notfor-profit, Be Inclusive Hospitality, in conjunction with several academic institutions, it was revealed that in terms of income, almost half of respondents were earning less than £20,000 per year.

On average this would place the majority of those on this income bracket earning an hourly salary somewhere between £9.62 and £10.40 which is dramatically lower than the figure calculated by the Living Wage Foundation for how much someone would need to earn to afford amenities outside of basic food, rent etc. The foundation places the UK Living Wage for outside of London at £12.00 per hour and adjusts it to £13.15 per hour for those within the boroughs of Greater London.

As of the 21st November 2023, the UK government has announced their new National Living Wage rates for 2024 as a mandatory £11.44 an hour, but this won’t come into effect until April of this year and still remains below the calculated figure of the Living Wage Foundation.

With progress slow on this front, it is unsurprising that many within the hospitality industry have turned to strengthening their union representation as a means of fighting for better pay and working conditions.

Unions and hospitality When compared to other industries, the hospitality sector is significantly underrepresented by union membership.

According to data published by the UK government, just over a fifth of employees were unionised across all industries whereas for hospitality, and sales and customer service occupations more broadly, these figures were dramatically lower at 14.5% for full-time workers and 15.5% for those working part-time.

This has contributed to the fact that, according to analysis by the Trade Union Congress, across all other sectors, real pay is lower now than it was in 2008. In September of last year, the TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak said that although average pay has finally inched above inflation in recent months, real wages are still falling across the public sector, retail, hospitality and construction.

Credit: Unsplash

Feature

Creative flair as a force for change Burum Collective is a Cardiff based organisation that started in 2020 during lockdown and acts as an online blog and networking facility, aiming to connect people in the hospitality and drinks industry. Rachel Hendry, who coedits the collective’s published output with her friend, Helen Anne Smith, and who herself has worked in hospitality for about 6 or 7 years now, says that they wished to write about bars and restaurants from the point of view of people who work within the industry.

She explains: “I think a lot of people that write about drinks don’t work in it; they’re not bartenders.”

Credit: Unsplash

A lot of their networking efforts have been geared toward increasing union representation within their industry and their website and latest print publication, the zine called Service, Please?, utilise creativity as a means to this end. The zine itself, released in November, combines the written work and illustrations of a handful of contributors with resources from Unite the Union. The co-editors of Burum hope that drinks and hospitality employees can distribute the zine with their beer and other products to pubs and bars, and spread information on how to organise effectively throughout the sector.

“The nature of hospitality really fuses that strength and it serves working relationships in very unique ways”

Credit: Unsplash

Hendry believes that the nature and working environment in restaurants, bars and other establishments provides fertile ground for the spread of unionising and uniting employees in a common goal. She says: “A restaurant relies on teamwork and really strong working relationships between people.

The nature of hospitality really fuses that strength and it serves working relationships in very unique ways.”

The hospitality industry, and unions in this country have a long way to go, but there is clearly some room for optimism even if tinged with a dose of realism. Henry is aware that she and Burum’s work maybe will not change the entire industry, but she believes that if a couple of people can make their workplace better or feel more confident in asking for things they are entitled to, then that is a success in and of itself. Besides, in order for any large-scale transformation to occur, you have to start somewhere and take steps in transforming the lives of those around you through solidarity.

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