Interview 12Wolfwind Collective is an independent publishing and distribution collective founded by Phillip Hawkey and Rob Jones.www.wolfwind.co.uk/wolfwind/TITLE.html
Tell me a little something about who is involved in Wolfwind Collective and how and why you came together.
We didn't make it a conscious decision to be in a collective. It kind of developed from just working together at Uni and hanging out to what it has developed into within the past month, which has been amazing. We have been given great opportunities to meet and work with other creative people in the industry and held our own zine convention.
How has the zine helped to develop your artistic practices?
A lot of the pieces featured in the zines are from projects that we've been working on so it's helpful to look at my work and assess what I think was working, what I'd like to take further and what maybe didn't work. Also, I think we feed off of each others ideas and feel comfortable giving criticism on each others work when putting together each issue.
What does the zine allow you to do that working in the mainstream can't?
The zine is like our world that we can do anything we want with...so I guess its freedom. If Phil wanted to do the next issue and put no images in and decided he wanted to put his poems in that world be fine. Every issue is something new and exciting so we don't have any art director who's expecting something that we have done before and wanting it again. It's our ideas.
In what ways has the Wolfwind Collective supported other zine producers? What are your plans for the future?
We held our own art and zine fair called 'MADE' in our town of Tunbridge Wells which was the first one Tunbridge Wells has ever seen with the aim of showing that London isn't is quite the 'be all and end all' thing and, that events such as these can happen anywhere and also to help local artists/zine lovers who find it hard to get certain events in London as well. Also our newly decorated website is housing a few independent zines from other collectives/zinesters. We are kind of trying to build up a little distro of zines and along the way we can help others by spreading the word. We both have ideas constantly floating around, so we are planning on doing another zine event in our hometown at some point next year as well as doing a few exhibitions around the country and of course, more zines. Hopefully we will have a few more ready for the Alternative Press zine convention in November.
