self-published zine (2023)
anxious matters takes the form of, and is a response to, a common intake survey in mental health treatment facilities called the GAD-7. Each page represents either a question or its response. With lengthy, somewhat illegible responses, it refuses the quantification and reduction of anxiety normally found in the form (along with a resulting “total score”), with long sentences filling the page, and spilling over onto themselves.
The zine was printed using risograph (or RISO), an obsolete printing technology that sits between digital duplication and more traditional screen printing processes. The machine uses light to scan an original document and then imprints its image onto an ink-filled drum—a material, but temporary memory system that allows for wet physical transfer onto paper
Within the gallery, the waiting room, the zine is found bound only by a clipboard, its pages unnumbered, allowing for questions to follow questions, answers to find themselves with other questions. In this fluid state, the zine remains unfinished—it too, is perpetually ‘not yet’.
It was designed as an invitation, situating visitors into a common ritual and artifact of waiting rooms but with a slight inversion—it is an invitation into my own experience and responses, without any expectation of response. An invitation to receive instead of being received.
But many visitors did respond. A pen attached to the clipboard (along with a gentle invitation in the introductory paragraph) allowed a reader to answer questions, engage with texts, provide personal anecdotes, and in some cases, converse with others across the duration of the installation. The form, designed to individualize and reduce anxiety and its symptoms, instead becomes expansive and generative—a place of connection between many different bodies and experiences. The final work becomes a new artifact, co-authored by anonymous yet personal collaborators.