On February 24 2025, Frontyard Projects, an artist-led centre in the Marrickville neighbourhood of Sydney, was the site of a single-table “Mini Zine Social” presented by the makers (and swimmers) behind “Small Press Swim Club”. They also hosted a presentation by me about mail art and exchange economies in the projects Renegade Library, bosque brotante (Present Cartographers), and Reading the Migration Library (RML). Frontyard, which operates as volunteer and donation-powered artists’ residencies and events, is also home to a cozy library made up of books and ephemera inherited from a local arts council. Their library room now features a display of the set of RML3: Undercurrents and Folds publications that were left in exchange for the talk.
The following amazing objects were exchanged for copies of RML publications and bosque brotante.
Vanessa Berry, I am a Camera #24 (June – August 2024)
For now the cat reminds me of the sad intense time when I was alone with my dad’s life, farewelling him as I packed everything away, returning his flat to a set of empty rooms.
The colophon at the end of this booklet describes how Vanessa Berry was reluctant to publish a description of the time when she was tasked with cleaning up her father’s home immediately following his death. She finally did, and the result is a spare, camera-like view of the materials and spaces that made up such an emotionally taxing obligation. In I am a Camera #24 the unsettling intensity of the task results in a minor drama involving a blue glass cat. It speaks of the very difficult responsibilities that we come upon, mostly unprepared, and that we tend to get through, often with an eye for its small episodes of absurdity and humour.
Cloudship Press, Helsinki – Berlin – Massiaru Across the Baltic Sea & Scandinavia: Thirteen Natural Colour Reproductions with Slow Travel familiar MOOMINMAMA (2025)
I ate a surprisingly nice vegetarian dinner – on a real plate – in the dining cart, where train staff were enjoying some lively down time.
One of two tiny books from Cloudship Press that Tessa Zettel shared with me on the topic of migration, this tiny plastic comb-bound booklet is a hyper-brief travel guide. It notates the journey from Helsinki to Berlin, by way of Scandinavian passenger ships crossing the Baltic Sea. A little Moomin figurine is found in most of the photos that appear as miniature postcards. Short travel notations sit opposite each of the 80s-style interior shots of the once elegant ships and trains.
Cloudship Press, Hoping for Delicious Change is Coming or, from the inside, An Illustrated Compendium of Notes on Preserving Food + Futures in an Age of Unsettlement.
INTIMACY
WITHOUT
PROXIMITY
TO MAKE
KIN IN LIVES
OF INVENTIVE
CONNECTION
Another tiny book from Cloudship Press, this one illustrates an assortment of pickling jars, each with poetic labels that reference the contents of inventive fermentations and other circumstances. The images are also found on the Making Time tea towel and the Coptic-bound Making Time: An Illustrated Compendium of Notes on Preserving Food & Futures in an Age of Unsettlement. These items together document a larger social practice project that the artists undertook to share fermentation experiences and recipes with others.
Occasional Weathering Report Supplement #1,from the project, The Weathering Report, second edition, 2019 (first edition, 2017). Edition: 55/80.
‘But how are we going to print the moon?’ Or, the weather of one’s stride as measured by a plastic bucket, a string, a piece of paper, a pencil, movement and time.
A folded, two-sided flutter-book appears to record the results of following one prompt from CA Conrad’s “(SOMA)TIC POETRY EXERCISES”. The publication documents a “weathering” (and “poethical”, from the project website) exercise that was aiming to creatively explore ways to understand and represent the weather, as encountered by and influenced by individual bodies (multi-species inclusive). Moon-like orbs in iridescent grey ink on a black sheet of folded paper are the resulting “weather maps”. A Merleau-Ponty quote about the body’s way of exceeding representation through time and space is found on the inside, along with the Conrad instructions. The project website includes weathering activity from this collaborative research team.
isabella brown, I want to Fill my Room with Plants. Edition five, 2024 (first published in 2018).
I’m putting down roots now, cultivating my new space,
one piece of furniture,
walk to the station,
or repotted cutting at a time.
they remind me that the speed
of growth is imperceptible,
a message to be patient
with my own unfurling.
This riso-printed zine, in pale green and pale blue on pale yellow paper, is a sunny view of a newly occupied room of one’s own. Its drawings of plants offer a quiet optimism for the slow progression toward independent and creative selfhood. It is bound with seam of sewing machine stitching.
Drita Ajredin and Isabella Brown, Putricia, The Corpse Flower, Goodnight Press, 2025.
Isabella Brown and 11 other contributors, Inspired by Putricia, The Corpse Flower: A Collaboration, Goodnight Press, 2025.
WWTF
We watch the flower
~
WDNEP
We do not eat Putricia
~
WDNRP
We do not rush Putricia
~
BBTB
Blessed be the bloom
I met two lovely strangers in the line to see Putricia. I love how a stinky flower has brought on such a wonderful
cultcommunity. – @hobbley.au
These sister zines commemorate the public appeal of Corpse Flower blossoms, propagated from cuttings taken from a wild plant in West Sumatra and featured in a special display in the Palm House of the Sydney Botanical Gardens in 2025. Ajredin’s zine includes photo documentation of the progression of the plant’s smelly blossom, as well as some of reflections on the cultural impact of the event, including social media banter. Brown’s collaboration with other contributors is an album of drawings and reflections of some of Putricia’s other fans. Both zines will be sold in the garden’s gift store with some of the proceeds headed towards supporting the conservation work of Sydney Botanical Gardens.
Kristelle De Freitas and Ella Cutler (with nine other contributors), Geranium Miscellany, Second edition, 2023. Saints Press. Edition: 20.
The colonial garden, and its enduring effects on Country are significant and continuous. We recognise the disruptions to land, culture and community that are tied in with the objects and locations of reflection within this book. First Nations peoples have sustained this land for millennia. We encourage an active meditation on this as you, our readers navigate the pages of this book.
Always was, always will be.
This coil-bound handbook is an assemblage of reflections and photos of geraniums from neighbourhoods and families. It is dedicated to the authors’ “mothers and their mothers, who have always loved gardens”. This is a touching dedication (and topic) for me, because it brings to vivid memory the way my recently-passed mother nurtured geraniums from cuttings she gathered on the street, She potted them in her seniors’ apartment and later enjoyed some of them in her nursing home bedroom, even in the months before she died. Why do mothers and grandmothers hold geraniums so dear? This miscellanium lets that question linger without nostalgia. It presents the phenomenon of the geranium also as an unfinished dilemma in ongoing colonialism. Signifying kinship with mothers, as well as stolen Indigenous land, geraniums appear to flourish in Australian streetscapes. Created from riso and other quick copy prints bound together, the book is as colourful and delightful to wander through, as a Marrickville streetscape interrupted by unruly geraniums, some neglected, others tidied.
Saints Press (Ella Cutler), Suggested Items For Your Pocket In No Particular Order Or Sense inside a hand-sewn fabric pocket, 2021.
All of the above books, except Vanessa Gerry’s I am a Camera, can be squeezed together into Ella Cutler’s hand-sewn fabric book pocket. It is an ingenious belt-hung pocket designed to both put fabric scraps into use in its making, and later to carry small books. Inside the pocket a tiny yellow accordion pamphlet offers illustrated Suggested Items For Your Pocket In No Particular Order Or Sense.I haven’t yet used it for “nasturtium seeds | embroidery kit | tea | bookbinding coils…”, but I did immediately put it to use with the belted sun cover that I had made for the trip to Australia. And, I hope to carry this idea forward. I’ll be telling others about this scrap-busting idea in my various home sewing groups. What a great idea.
