Short Supply X Whitworth Young Contemporaries

In October 2021 we collaborated with Short Supply to work with our youth group, Whitworth Young Contemporaries. The group is aimed at young people aged 16 – 24, and revolves around the academic year.

As with the previous 18 months, Whitworth Young Contemporaries were still meeting online via Zoom. It was important for us at the gallery that during the pandemic the group still met every two weeks as it fostered friendship and a sense of community. As the government were still restricting the number of people that could meet in person it meant that we were restricted to online activity only. As such, it was decided to explore Zines further as a medium for collaboration.

As a queer producer I decided to explore what queerness was with the young people and as such I decided to approach the arts collective Short Supply. If you do not know who Short Supply are then where have you been hiding. The artist led organisation is made up of a trio of queer and non-binary individuals – Mollie Balshaw and Rebekah Beasly are the groups Directors and Grace Collins is the organisations Creative Consultant. Short Supply are a bridge between early-career artists and the more established art world, breaking the cycle of needing work to gain a reputation and needing a reputation to get work.

Grace Collins worked closely with the group to facilitate our online creative sessions. The sessions, amongst other themes explored our domestic interior to consider what might be considered queer, with the sessions then lending themselves to facilitating conversations around what queerness meant to each of us. Working on Zoom, the group also contributed art pieces to a shared file that would be included within the zine.

However, we were also fortunate to meet in person on a couple of occasions when covid conditions allowed. Over the December period the group held zine making sessions in the School of Creativity and invited visitors of the gallery to contribute to the creation of our zine. These contributions are also included in the finished publication.

(Frost Fair Zine Making Session)

The Zine also contains a conversation that was recorded via some software called Otter. Otter allows for any conversation to be typed out as it happens and then saved. However, depending on how strong someone’s accent is, Otter often gets the words and grammar incorrect, which helps to queer the text itself because in parts the grammar does not follow standard English rules. The title of the Zine Oh, Great. Oh, Queer was also chosen by collectively highlighting certain statements from the Otter text.

Short Supply created a safe space with which our young people could ask open and explorative questions on aspects of gender and sexuality. Whilst most of the group identified themselves as cis-gendered heterosexuals, each member flourished in a safe space to understand what queerness was, and what it could mean for their own creative practices. It also fostered an environment where those members of the group who identified as LGBTQIA+ could be creative in an open and inclusive way without feeling they might be restricted in their creative outputs.