DREAM SCENES: A COMIC AND ZINE WORKSHOP
with Jenny Lin
February 11, 2022, on Zoom
“When we’re making
art about our
dreams,
are we making
works of fiction?”
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
In this part of the workshop, Jenny leads a thought experiment that allows participants to meditate on
a dream – what is it, how it can be conveyed, and why we might want to. She proposes that the
essence of a dream may be the feeling of it, which can be translated to others through image and
text-based abstraction, using the simplicity and flexibility of comics and zines.
“HOW I RECORD MY DREAMS”
Jenny walks us through her process for documenting dreams to be translated into zines. She
encourages letting go of specificity to better capture the feeling, and absurdity, of dreams. For her
own practice, she avoids analyzing the dream to give more room for the viewer to bring their own
intuitions and interpretations.
Zine how-to
Hands-on zine making tutorial, including two variations of
the 8 page folded zine, a square format zine, and 9-panel
meander book.
WRITING/DRAWING EXERCISE
To generate the content of the dream zine, Jenny walks participants step-by-step
through a writing and drawing exercise. In so doing, she offers the opportunity to
study for oneself what is actually contained in their dream, how it can be
deconstructed, and experienced anew in zine format.
Made during the workshop
by Jim Holyoak
Jim Holyoak’s art practice consists of drawing and writing, artists’ books and room-sized drawing installations. Throughout his life, drawing has been a way of contemplating animals and monsters, the real and unreal, metamorphosis and hidden worlds.
Additional ressources
- Book Binding with the Two Lins
- Folding and Binding techniques
- Lynda Barry on Making Comics
- Lynda Barry’s YouTube Channel
- Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud
- The Believer’s Comics Workshop series
Jenny Lin is a visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal. Working with experimental narrative and autobiographical fiction, primarily in the form of print-based installations, artists’ books and zines, Lin is drawn to the socio-political, accessible and community-based aspects of print and zine-making, self-publishing and self-distribution. Lin uses drawing and text as a way to process life experiences and current events, parsing situations into visual sequences that move through, in particular, discomfort, ambiguity and uncertainty.
She has collaborated with Eloisa Aquino as B&D Press, a queer art and micropress project, since 2009. Lin was involved as a core member of Qouleur Qollective, a member of articule’s Fabulous Committee, and cofounded the Queer Print Club at Concordia University where she teaches as a sessional instructor in the Print Media Program Area.
Jenny’s diverse body of work spans from the narrative and autobiographical to abstract and entirely wordless. She runs a DIY printing company, B&D Press, with her partner Eloisa. Jenny works in various zine formats, from pop-up books to posters, and throughout the pandemic worked with the limits of Instagram to create 9 panel comics. During this phase, she began to record and express the particularities of her pandemic-related dreams through her art.