ONE OF MY KIND
ISSUE THREE : DRAWING
Editor Sofia Niazi Assistant Editor Heiba Lamara Designer Rose Nordin ISSUE THREE, Autumn 2014. Cover image by Sofia Niazi and Rose Nordin. If you wish to reproduce any content from OOMK Zine please contact the artist/s listed. oomkzine@gmail.comt Facebook /oomkZine Twitter @oomkzine – www.oomk.net
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” — Arundhati Roy
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Drawing + Zoe Taylor + Brianna McCarthy + Phoebe Boswell + Sofia Niazi + Molly Crabapple + Arub Saqib + Fatma Al-Remaihi + Foo Swee Chin
Words + Sumaya Kassim + Hannah Habibi Hopkin + Arwa Aburawa + Shaheen Kasmani + Hamiza Adenan + M Ly Eliot + Hadeel Eltayeb + Heiba Lamara
Illustration + Design + Divya Osbon + Sabba Khan + Nuha El Shareef + Saira Wasim + Sonia Yekinni + Reiko Chen + Jasmine Parker
Photography + Nasreen Raja + Sara Foryame + Nasreen Shaikh Jamal Al Lail + Sanaa Hamid
Conversation + Laal Boutique + Lonely Londoners + Media DIversified + Madras Cafe
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Whether drawing to discover, record, instruct or just pass time, the process of drawing is one that most people are familiar with but few take seriously. In our third issue, we take a look at artists and individuals who have approached drawing with great curiosity, passion and commitment. Whether using their skills to weave intricate stories or raise awareness about important issues, these artist continue an ancient tradition of seeing the world around them and translating it in their own lines.
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Interview Sofia Niazi
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Zoe Taylor channels inky film-noir to create striking improvised illustrations of women possessing mysterious intent and purpose. She speaks about discovering drawing, harnessing
+ When starting a new piece of work what sources do you draw influence from? I find music and film inspiring. I always want the drawing to suggest a particular
drama and the possibilities of storytelling.
atmosphere – that’s the main thing and then I gather loads of photographs. I often use film stills or photographs as a starting point.
+ What is drawing? It’s not easy to define but for me it’s about making marks on a surface to visualize or suggest something. + You’ve been working as an illustrator for some time now. How did you get into it? I’ve always enjoyed drawing but I didn’t have any understanding about what illustration was or could be until I took a foundation course, which I enrolled on just for fun as a kind of gap year – I was all set to start a masters in Social Anthropology afterwards. But during that time I realized that all of my drawings were narrative based and it was great to discover that there was actually a discipline where you could explore that. So I went on to study illustration instead and eventually started getting some commissions. + Are stories and sequences something that you are naturally drawn to? I do really like drama and theatricality and stories that are ambiguous and open – ended. I don’t really know where it comes from as I’ve never been a big reader of fiction or comics. My mum teaches drama and used to bring me along to all of her classes when I was very young. We’d always have to improvise and make up stories as we acted them out, so maybe it started there. + Does text play any role in your process? Whenever I’ve tried putting text with my personal drawings, it always seems to detract from them and I end up scribbling it out. But I’ve shaped stories around phrases from song lyrics or bits of dialogue, and I tend to write out my stories before I draw them so writing is often a part of the process. When I’m working on commissions the drawings normally have to relate to a text.
+ I was surprised to learn that you did a lot of fashion illustration – was it a natural progression or something you have had to adapt to suit your way of working? It was really unexpected – I think all of the commissions I received after graduating were fashion related so it just happened (although I approached AnOther magazine myself, offering to do a kind of comic strip for their website). They asked me to do fashion illustrations instead but they wanted the drawings to suggest stories. Coming up with the ideas was easy but drawing them took ages; I re‑drew some of them so many times. When I make personal drawings I like to improvise and see what happens but I find it hard to approach commissions that way; I try to control everything. I’d do things a bit differently now but at the time I just saw it as a chance to explore some mini narratives I didn’t really think of it as fashion illustration. + Women feature quite heavily in your work. What sort of women and female narratives most interest you? Over the years, fairy-tale heroines, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and film noir women have been influences. Probably stories in which women experience some kind of tension or danger or extreme feeling interest me most. I like ‘woman in peril’ narratives. Directors like David Lynch and Rainer Werner Fassbinder have explored this theme in interesting ways but you also find it in horror films, melodramas and thrillers – I think most of my favourite films follow this kind of story. I also like the romantic narratives performed by groups like the Ronettes or the Shangri Las where all the feeling is so heightened.
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Anima/animus series, Brianna McCarthy
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globally, as explicitly awakening her political conscious: her experience as a working class, black woman, and that of her mother who died at the age of thirty-seven as the result of the
rulings constitutes no crime - that of holding Communist ideas; of being a member and officer of the Communist Party of the United States?’
dire work conditions she was forced to work under. Jones also mentions the Scottsboro Boys case, in which nine black men were found guilty by an all-white jury (after three separate trials) of raping two white women and variously sentenced to imprisonment or death - a false conviction. Jones joined the Communist Party in 1936, and threw herself into writing, organizing and campaigning for justice. She became Associate Editor of the Weekly Review, and the secretary of the Executive Committee of Young Communist League in Harlem - a year later she was the New York State Chair of the NCNYCL. In 1941 she became the Educational Director of the Young Communist League, organising and giving courses titled ‘Negro Women in Political Life’ alongside Lorraine Hansberry and Charlotte Bass. She then became Editorin-Chief of the Weekly Review and Spotlight. In 1947, she was elected Secretary of the Women’s Commission, Communist Party USA. All whilst under intense FBI surveillance. Over a period of four years, Jones was
Shortly after, she suffered from heart failure and was hospitalized, diagnosed with cardiovascular disease exacerbated by her time in prison. The next year, she became editor of Negro Affairs Quarterly. Finally, in 1955, she was imprisoned on Ellis Island and then deported to London on compassionate grounds. In deporting her, America attempted to forget her and until very recently it had nearly succeeded. Jones was little mentioned until the release of Carole Boyce-Davies’ groundbreaking book, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008). Davies demonstrates brilliantly how Jones revised Marxism to accommodate the experience of the black, working class woman, who Jones recognised had the potential to be the vanguard of revolutionary action. This is explored in her famous 1949 tract, “End the Exploitation of the Negro Woman!”. She writes: ‘The Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight
arrested and released three times. In 1948, she was arrested and imprisoned on Ellis Island: released on bail the next day, she was immediately assigned by the Party to tour 43 US states, reorganizing state-level women’s commissions, recruiting new members and organizing mass rallies. In 1950 she was, again, arrested and held on Ellis Island for four months. Again, released on bail, she continued to speak, write and organize, serving on the National Peace Commission at the end of the Korean War. At her trial on February 2nd, 1953, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt, she stood before the courtroom and declared: ‘Your Honor, there are a few things I wish to say! ... I say these things not with any idea that what I say will influence your sentence of me. For even with all the power your Honor holds, how can you decide to mete out justice for the only act which I proudly plead, and one, moreover, which by your own
all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive women’s movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro and the woman is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness. To the extent, further, that the cause of the Negro woman worker is promoted, she will be enabled to take her rightful place in the Negro proletarian leadership of the national liberation movement, and by her active participation contribute to the entire American working class, whose historic mission is the achievement of a Socialist America – the final and full guarantee of woman’s emancipation.’ It cannot be overstated what a remarkable individual Claudia Jones was, but it is important to recognise her predecessors, friends and collaborators who formed a wide
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A very short and personal history of colonialism and resistance
Words Arwa Aburawa
When I was around 8, my mother sat my brothers, sisters and I down, rolled open a map and said to us, “This is where you are from – Palestine.” She pointed to a village between Hebron and Beersheba. “That’s where your dad is from,” she explained, “Beit ‘Afa here in Gaza is where my family is from, and this is Jericho where I was born.” The map showed a long and thin stretch of land dotted with thousands of little villages, towns, family names and tribes. We looked at the flat, sepia-washed drawing and it suddenly opened up a door to an imagined land where Arabs wore glorious robes and talked in classical Arabic, an ancient time of prophets wandering around Jerusalem, of war and conflict, refugees camps and our lost homelands of oranges and deserts.
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I was hooked. I spent hours poring over the world atlas at school but I couldn’t see the Palestine I saw in the map at home. My country was now split in two and there were just a few names Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Israel, West Bank. Where had my parent’s homes gone? Where were their villages? Why were their family names not on this map too? When we moved house, I carefully folded away the map of Palestine that had hung on our wall and I kept it safe, worried they may be in short supply. I stumbled onto maps again at university, but this time I studied how they were used to oppress, divide and control. The British colonised India by slowly mapping every inch of the country and using it to break up regions and alliances. They used the map to
say, ‘Look at us! Look how we cleverly mapped you. Surrender to our greatness’. The maps helped the British sidestep local figures and ensured everyone paid their taxes, a major
I was no longer seeing the world through the eyes of hundreds of years of colonial domination and to be honest, it looked strange. That was ‘power’ - the ability to deeply
bonus.
influence the way I saw myself, the entire world. Often appearing as factual they are merely representions of the world, and in doing so the maps we make, the borders we draw and the names we take on are steeped in the power politics of our time. Maybe maps are more dangerous than they are worth. The dark and inevitable lines cutting through rivers, forests and desolate deserts that fracture our humanity into little pieces which we reserve only for those on our side of the border. Is it time to draw again and anew - or is it time to stop drawing all together? Maybe my fascination with maps is a product of my personal history as a Palestinian. I’ve often wondered if everyone has such intimate knowledge of their countries’ geography or if it’s only those of us who are exiled, those of us who worry that if we don’t remember the details, the name of roads and cities, then no one else will. There are those of us who are exiled and want to draw a path across oceans and land to see how we link together two sides of our identity.
While I discovered the increasingly ugly side of maps, it was also the moment I came to know something else: that my map of Palestine was an act and an object of resistance, an attempt to remember what could be so easily lost- indeed what we had already lost. My map existed to refute all those maps that had so completely wiped my mother and father’s names and homes away. There are no good or bad maps, just necessary ones. Maps are an intimate and distinct product of the social and political structures that create them. One map that really brought that message home came tucked carefully into a copy of a New Internationalist magazine. I remember opening it up and just staring at it, trying to figure out exactly why it looked not quite right... Africa and South America were much too big and Europe was tiny - you could barely see the UK. I was seeing the world’s continents in correct proportion for the first time. Peters’ Projection World Map, drawn up by German historian Arno Peters, is not only more accurate, but offers a new world perspective. In a traditionally Eurocentric map, Europe, at 9.7 million sq km, appears to be bigger than South America, which at 17.8 million sq km is near twice the size. Africa is typically drawn as being smaller than North America despite being over 10 million sq km bigger. There was a time when maps looked very different. In the past, Arab cartographers drew maps with South facing upwards, like the Chinese, and Europeans once placed the East at the top and Jerusalem at the centre of the world. Others drew maps with no up or down, with the words facing inwards from the edges. The placement of South at the bottom of a map I discovered was a decision secured by Western cartographers’ obsession with Ptolemy, a Hellenic cartographer from Egypt, who had laid out the world with North at the top of the map in the second century A.D.
Despite all I know, I do feel maps can be beautiful. They show pathways, roads and rivers, towns and cities, and railway lines. Although I float somewhere above Europe, stranded between Britain and Palestine, I am mesmerised by the sheer beauty and information that they can carry. Maps of Buxton, Berlin and British-Mandate Palestine; maps where Arabia still exists and the USSR hasn’t crumbled along with the Berlin wall. I guess in the end that what I love about maps is their contradictions. They unite and divide. They reveal and inform but they also lie and conceal. They map permanent surfaces but are in constant flux, new countries are written in, old ones are taken out, continents grow and shrink and their centre shifts to reflect its audience. What is a map but an artefact of the broken and beautiful nature of humanity?
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Images Molly Crabapple, Words Sofia Niazi
100,000 Names was a memorial project spearheaded by US based Syria activist Amal Hanano to honour the memories of those killed in the ongoing conflict in Syria. On March 14, 2013, Hanano lead a powerful 72-hour-long recitation on the White House lawn of 100,000 names of those killed in Syria. To coincide, political illustrator and activist Molly Crabapple made a series of haunting portraits of some of those mentioned in the memorial. The portraits have been shared widely online on different platforms, confronting us with a glimpse of the real lives of the people behind the statistics; they act as a haunting reminder of the devastating loss of life in Syria.
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Amina Othman, was a second year literature student at the University of Aleppo. She was displaced three times during the conflict. Amina was killed in Aleppo in 2013, when her uncle’s home was shelled while she was inside. Rua Ismael, was eleven when she reportedly died from a bombing in the town of Salamiyeh on Jan. 25, 2013. After her death, Rua was nicknamed “Syria’s Snow White” on Syrian social media.
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Untitled Sketchbooks, Pascaline Knight
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We’ve devised two simple experiments to get you thinking, seeing and drawing. You Will Need + Pencil + Notepad/sketchbook + Tracing paper (or baking paper) + Watch Experiment 1: Memory It’s incredibly hard to draw things accurately from memory, even if it’s something you’ve seen a million times. Whatever your drawing abilities are, this test will show you that a drawing you have made from memory will look very different to one you have drawn from observation. Step 1: Think of an animal Step 2: Open your sketchbook and draw the animal from memory (don’t be disheartened if it looks very weird.) Step 3: Get a piece of tracing paper and Google the animal you were thinking of. Step 4: Draw the animal again but using one of the Google image for reference. Step 5: Stick the tracing paper over your original drawing and just marvel at the difference. Experiment 2: Seeing Sometimes you may draw something that is directly in front of you, but it will still come out looking nothing like what it should. This test will show you that the accuracy of an observational drawing can depend on how much you look at it and the amount of time you spend. Step 1: Go out with a sketchbook and pencil. Step 2: After one minute of walking stop and choose an object you see close by. Step 3: Give your self 5 seconds to look at the object and then turn around and draw it in your sketchbook (no peeking). Step 4: Now turn to the object again, give your self as much time as you like and make sure you keep looking at the object while you are drawing. Amazing right? Send us your drawings to be featured in the next issue, oomkzine@gmail.com.
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Post from Palestine 82
The theme for issue 4 is The Internet. Any written words or visual submissions related to the Internet are welcome. Here are some ideas: blogging, social networking, Internet art, GIFs, early memories of the Internet, predictions, experiments, virality, memes, time, identity, visibility, privacy and celebrity. More general submissions relating to women, spirituality, creative practices and exploration are also very welcome. OOMK love surprises so if you’ve got something special send it our way! Submissions to oomkzine@gmail.com
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AUTUMN 2014 WWW.OOMK.NET
ISSN 2051-9907 84