“The Swimmer Wears Her Suitcase” 2024, risograph zine with collage elements, variable edition of 12 available. 8”25” x 5.25” closed. This zine was an experiment in randomly pairing found text and images. I’m captivated by the surprising discoveries in this process of designing on press using physical materials rather than files to create layered collages.
The Lagoon Empties, 2024, edition of 12. Saddle-bound risograph zine featuring landscape drawings and travel notes from a 2013 residency in southwestern Iceland. 5.5” tall x 6” wide. 20 pages. Signed and numbered.
This sequence of contour line drawings and incomplete travel notes presents a fragmented narrative about the flawed nature of memory. Created with materials from a 2013 residency in southwestern Iceland, revisiting my observations years later feels strange; the language seems specific and vague, concrete and ethereal, personal and universal. The vivid greens and blues evoke the vivid mosses and turquoise glacial waters we saw on our travels.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Cool, misty gusts flap my rain hood against my ears— moss colonies spread across lava rocks like new galaxies.”
“I see that the lagoon empties the ice slowly, each chuck must first melt down in size before it can pass through the bottle neck and reach the sea.”
BLOX, 2024, by Rachel Simmons
The changing folds of this single sheet mini zig zag zine encourages the reader to turn its pages from different directions and create their own story from the resulting sequences. The imagery, which speaks to the nature of human existence, was drawn digitally and then printed on both sides. The front cover is holographic vinyl. More info at www.rachelsimmons.net
Copenhagen + Malmö May 2022 by Rachel Simmons
Published at the end of 2023, this travel memoir was drawn with ball point pen on the flight home from Denmark a year before, and offers reflections on the artists I met whether in person at the book art shop Bladr or through seeing exhibitions of their work.
Satellites, 2023 by Rachel Simmons. Digitally printed on vellum, 20 sheets, stapled, 8.5” tall x 5.5” wide. This zine poses maddening questions like this: Where is the line between consuming and living? How do we navigate the complexities of our day-to-day survival in the time of streaming and posting? What is our intake of daily global disasters and how do we purge ourselves of it?
Each copy of this mixed media zine is unique, featuring cut outs, metallic tape and punch labels. The text is appropriated from Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy” and “Our Earth” by Arthur Beiser, both published in 1959. The text is layered over satellite images of space from vintage magazines, encouraging the reader to examine the scale of our physical existence within the immensity of the universe.
These little double-sided spiral zines take on big topics like how to launch into the unknown and what exactly on we doing on Earth anyway?
A series of 4.25” rolling books with typewritten text, screen printing, relief, letterpress, monotype and digital prints. Pages were cut from remnants of other projects; each sphere functions as a time capsule of ideas. Edition of 8. Available in the shop.
“Dead Foxes” is made with found collage and original poetry about love. The imagery was drawn from our household collection of vintage Nat Geos as well as a German book on the 1972 Olympics—all reconfigured atop a hand painted gouache background. The blocky patterned hand-sewn covers are remnants from letterpress prints. This single sheet accordion booklet has a page size of 4.25” x 3.75” Fully open it measures 11” x 17”
XYZ combines heavily textured monotype prints with a poem about coming home. Digitally printed on watercolor paper, doubled sided. Folded dimensions 6.5” x 4.75”, open dimensions 13” x 19”
Created in 2021
24 Hour Zine, Issue Three, January 29, 2019
24 Hour Zine, Issue 3 was created from scanned images, textures, poems, prints, and patterns. The yellow bars of text reflect what is on my mind on the day these items are assembled into a zine.
This zine was created as a visual journal, a mixed media fusion of writing and art. A 24 hour visual journal is a snapshot of a moment in my life, an opportunity to gather the clutter around me and synthesize these mundane materials into a special time capsule documenting this particular moment. To start, I gather up whatever paper-based material is in reach-- receipts from my wallet, take-out menus from the dining room table, doodles in my meeting notebook--anything that seems recent and somewhat inconsequential. Magazine clippings, too. I take a look at this pile of stuff, take a deep breath, and then write for 15 minutes without pausing. I allow the random thoughts bouncing around in my head to come spilling out onto the paper or screen. This is the raw material for my 24 hour zine which is assembled, copied and then disseminated.
An experiment with my typewriter—created 40 slots to fill with words from 6 different categories taken from envelopes—
“my dreams are strange; more real than waking life”, a zine created in the first month of the COVID 19 pandemic in spring 2020, with watercolor illustrations and typewriter produced text, 8.5” 5.5”, 12 pages
This collaborative community zine was created at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL during the fall of 2019 and shown at Orlando Zine Fest in December that year. Contributors included students, staff, faculty, alumni and other members of the local community. The zine was produced on several typewriters, each labeled with a different prompt. Writers moved between machines, adding responses to the prompts as they went like a game of musical chairs. The text was then compiled and collated into a zine which was organized in chapters based on the prompts. Some of the prompts were: “Advice Column,” Soap Box,” “Secrets,” and “Numbers.”
This collaborative community zine was created at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL during the fall of 2019 and shown at Orlando Zine Fest in December that year. Contributors included students, staff, faculty, alumni and other members of the local community. The zine was produced on several typewriters, each labeled with a different prompt. Writers moved between machines, adding responses to the prompts as they went like a game of musical chairs. The text was then compiled and collated into a zine which was organized in chapters based on the prompts. Some of the prompts were: “Advice Column,” Soap Box,” “Secrets,” and “Numbers.”