TWPTF has come and gone, and what a fantastic experience it was. To a huge extent this was due to the truly remarkable organizational skills of its initiator Rona Green.
Currently I’m reading Man with a Blue Scarf, Martin Gayford’s memoir of his portrait sitting for Lucian Freud. On the subject of work, Gayford quotes the great Duke Ellington: ‘I don’t need time, I need a deadline.’ Freud disagrees, firmly believing the opposite. Usually I’m with Freud on this issue, but in the case of TWPTF, Ellington was right. With the solo exhibition at Malmsbury opening less than a week earlier, I began to recognize that I’d been crazy to pledge two new zines for TWPTF, even though work on one in particular had been under way for some time. But as they finally began to come together (and as time began seriously to run out) more ideas suddenly came. The Moth Woman Vigilantes zine spawned the mini-zine, which opens into a small poster, Moth Woman Vigilantes: a Menace to Society (see above.) I enjoyed the immediacy of this format so much, it led to two more mini-zines: Secret Hairstories and Hairlooms.
There was very little time left to make up more copies of the 2010 zine Material Girls. It turned out to be particularly well received, so the extra effort was well worth it.
For those who missed TWPTF, my efforts and those of several other participants, including Megan Herring, Paul Compton, Sheridan Jones, Gail Stiffe and Gracia and Louise, can be found at Hand Held Gallery in Bourke Street, Melbourne.
All the photographs below are by Shane Jones. Click on images to enlarge.
In foreground: TWPTF organizer and participant
Rona Green
Foreground, left: Megan Herring and Adrian Lawson
Third from left: Sheridan Jones
Moth Woman Press table
Deep in conversation with fellow TWPTF participant
Paul Compton