Zines, Books, and Beyond: The Practice of Jac Batey

I run MA illustration and teach on BA illustration. Also supervise practice-based PhDs. Specialism is in illustration/artistbooks/zines and teaching. My own creative practice is mostly as in artists book /artzines and as an artist. I work both digitally and also with real materials like drawing, collage and print. I think social awareness and research skills are an important part of teaching illustration. I initiated and curate the UoP Artzine collection Zineopolis, this is a research hub and a collection of over 500 artzines from lots of countries and makers. I include student zines as well. This resource is used for teaching (we have zine modules) but also to generate staff research both in conceptualising and disseminating. There’s a summary on the REF database since this was an IMAPCT case study in REF21
https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact/...
The main Zineopolis site is here
https://zineopolis.blogspot.com/p/abo...

You can see my practice here:
https://jacbatey.com/

This site also links to specific sites on artists books (Damp Flat Books)

Since its inception in 2019, Design Education Talks podcast has served as a dynamic platform for the exchange of insights and ideas within the realm of art and design education. This initiative sprang from a culmination of nearly a decade of extensive research conducted by Lefteris Heretakis. His rich background, intertwining academia, industry, and student engagement, laid the foundation for a podcast that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of educational discourse.

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Transcript

0:09

and welcome to Design Education Talks for the New Art School. Our guest today is Jack Beatty. Welcome, Jack. Oh, hello. Good to be here. It's great for you to be here. So tell us about your new work. Well, I work at the University of Portsmouth. I've been there for over 25 years. So originally trained as an illustrator in Brighton University, taught on the sequential MA in illustration, editorial design as it was then, and then teached at Portsmouth. So I kind of have worked on level four, level five, level six. Then I started the MA in illustration with a colleague in 2015. So I've been running the MA in illustration since then. And all through this, I worked as a practice-based researcher with scenes and artist books. And I now also support PhD students and practice-based PhD students in particular. Oh, wonderful. So quite a variety of jobs. Wonderful. So at the beginning, how did you get into teaching? Very much by accident. So I was working at Brighton University as an MA student. I was an MA illustration student. And strangely at that point, you were allowed to sign on to the sort of dole and be a student at the same time. So there was quite a lot of support. There was a sort of like grants, et cetera, that you could apply for. So. To try and get people back into training and get people back into work, the government actually put a fund where they would let you do a restart training course. Actually, with a colleague at the university, I started training as a researcher. Again, it was through a government scheme. Through the training as a researcher, I learned how to use a lot of the Adobe software. At that point in time, about 1995, that was quite new. Then put me in a very strong position to start teaching Photoshop, Illustrator. and QuarkXPress as it was then to students. Yeah. So tell us, I mean, what's changed in all those years for you? I think I was there at the point when the polytechnics changed into universities. So when I started my degree, I went to a polytechnic thinking I was doing a vocational course. And when I graduated, I graduated from a university that was then trying to align with research goals and align with other universities. So the change was really quite radical. I think the pressure on the staff to change very quickly, to reposition their work was quite dramatic. And so when I then started teaching, I suddenly found myself teaching in a quite unfamiliar environment, which was the university environment. The structure was very different and the vocational somehow seemed to be, I suppose it was seen as somehow second rate. And there was a very clear hierarchy and the language seemed to have to change very quickly. So I've enjoyed teaching at university, but the aims and the goals seemed to be... quite different from what I was expecting when I entered as a student. I think in terms of research, particularly, I think creative arts, although it can work very well within a creative research environment, the language has been off putting the way people apply for grants, the way people fit within a bigger, I suppose, a REF research excellence framework situation is uncomfortable. I find I'm having the same arguments to try and support practice for about the last 25 years. And where I thought things were moving much more quickly forward, I think it's still problematic. I think there is still a lack of confidence, especially at PhD level with practice-based research. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we're coming full circle again, and it seems that in a couple of years, nothing will ever be the same again. So what do you think that ways now more, do you think that, you know, in terms of practice? From staff or students? Sorry, from the outcome, yeah, from what's important for the students. I think it's been very difficult, especially post-COVID. I think so many things have changed so rapidly that I thought where there has been structures in place to support students into jobs, for example, those structures have had to move very quickly because COVID has been reimagined how people work. I mean, just the balance between working at home or working in an office. I think things like AI coming in very quickly are going to cause even more problems. A lot of, I suppose you could say entry-level jobs, people can do some of those jobs using sort of AI tools, not necessarily brilliantly, but cheaply. So I think it's put everybody in quite an uncomfortable situation as to how we best support students. I think my philosophy is we need to make people as flexible and as adaptable as possible, but... emphasis needs to be on the creative thinking because there will always be another tool and another method. But a creative thinker can probably survive this. Whereas I think if we're leaning very heavily on teaching people tools, I think we're going to find that those tools are out of date very quickly. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for freelancers, COVID was not much of a disruption. I mean, I was sending files via FTP in early 2000s and we had Skype and we had... So, for freelancers, COVID was not a disruption because it's the way we were working 20 years before, nearly. I think the impact maybe happened more for people that were minding children. I mean, I'm talking particularly about, I think women got hit much harder. I think there's a lot of looking after elderly parents and looking after children that maybe schools have done or there was care for elderly parents. That burden still, you know, whatever moves we make to equality, that burden still seems to fall unevenly. So I had colleagues trying to homeschool, then trying to carry on freelancing, then trying to... Absolutely. No, no. What I was going to say was there wasn't much of a disruption compared to the AI disruption that is coming. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that that's come so quickly that I've talked to friends in publishing that are... So they're using generating book covers very rapidly, which again was a... career staple for some freelancers, which is now sort of disappearing. And then at the same time, you've got, I think, quite unethical companies like Fiverr that are encouraging people to undersell their work quite dramatically. So I mean, some of the commissioning prices are not that different from when I started work when I was sort of 20. Now I'm 56. The money is the same. It seems like it's very difficult to make a sustainable career from that. So how do you see the future of employment for graduates? I think within illustration, it's a very varied field. I think the more we recognize that, the better. So I think, again, one of the major differences when I started as a student is it seemed to be pushing people more towards sort of children's book covers or editorial, occasionally music. But I think now we have students graduating that are sketchnoters or graphic recorders. We have people working within sort of NHS projects to try and make science more communicable, which I think is interesting. I suppose the value of artists and drawing is much more wide reaching. So I suppose it's recognizing some of those opportunities, um, rather than hanging onto just a few things that maybe are not there anymore. There's also a lot of people going into education or student, um, things like workshop facilitation, uh, community arts projects. There's quite a few, uh, fields of art therapy, et cetera, where I think it's much more diverse than it used to be, which is a good thing. Absolutely. No, I mean, it seems that this It seems that now is the time for a lot of reinvention and a lot of looking at what is really happening right now in order to try and second guess what's happening tomorrow as well. It's difficult working within a university because the systems can be quite slow. So you do find yourself planning a year, if not two years ahead. So it's difficult to be very reactive. So I suppose I think we're finding strategies of keeping systems as vague as possible so we can move much quicker at a local level. in the best possible way. Absolutely. It's important to have more collaborative projects. I think we can underestimate how much we have to work with other people when we're freelance or when we're working within a company. So I think building up some of those skills, especially the people or the generation that miss some of those more social skills during COVID, it's that sort of learning to get on with people and be more sociable, I think. forget, I take it for granted, but I think it's something we actually do learn. Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about your own research work and your project that you're doing outside of teaching right now. I work on a serial zine called Future Fantastic. I've been doing this for, you know, I suppose it's about 1996 or so. So in a way, it's a visual diary. I just sort of draw everything that surrounds me during the day to day week. And then when I have enough material I sort of edit and then I produce it as a zine. I tend to do this once a year, so I have a zine, which is pretty much a satirical visual diary. But I look back on it now, and because there's 23 issues of it, it's almost like a little view of Britain from things that have changed. So it's got quantitative easing, Brexit, COVID obviously, and then coming through to sort of some of the dramas that are going on at the moment, and right down to sort of... petty annoyances of just day to day commuting and all the train strikes that have been going on. At the moment, I'm working on the latest issue. I'm working in collaboration with Jesse Randler, librarian, curator and poet from Colorado University. She's written some poems about libraries. They're short, very witty, but they're poems where People have a performative love of libraries, but it's quite a fake front. And the sort of the support of libraries is basically verbal. And then there's another poem, which is talking about what happens in the future and all the books have gone, which is again, has been a reoccurring debate. So I've made all the collages out of withdrawn library books. So my kind librarian has kept lots of books. I've ripped them to bits and reconfigured all of the information, including the little library tickets. the library cards that you might remember from your youth and reconfigured these into sort of telling the story of the libraries. So at the moment, we're looking at trying to make a back-to-back book with the two poems in. So hopefully we should be complete by July. Oh, wow. The previous projects were mostly concerned with mental health and some of the dialogues around mental health, and particularly some of the language that we use to bully each other. And I'm thinking in a, say, in a HE context. Some of the things like the gentle reminder email, for example, I think is very familiar. It's not gentle. We all know that. There are other languages such as resilience workshops, where it places the blame very much on the individual because you're not resilient. It's therefore you are failing, not the system is failing you. Quite often it's repitching this language. Things like your side hustle. the implication that you should not only do your job, but you should have another job. I mean, it's ridiculous pressure and the sort of nonsense of everyday speak. Once you write it down and you visualize it, I think it actually becomes very funny. And maybe that absurdity is part of making us all aware that we are actually sort of bullying people when we use this language. Fantastic. And how have you found that this work has fed back into your teaching? Well, the nice thing about collecting the working with the zines and collecting zines is I did actually get some support from the university to set it up as a zine collection. So, Zenopolis is the name. There's over 500 art zines in it now. So, it's a wonderful online collection. And this is great because it supports teaching and learning. So, I can use the zines to show students some of the things that people are talking about. It's very immediate. Things are produced in a day, can be sent out the day after. They can be swapped and shared very easily with people. They're uncensored. It's a very dynamic view of what people really want to talk about. Obviously, you need a curator to make sure that that's appropriate, but it's quite exciting work. And then the students I run, and with colleagues, we run zine projects. So the students can then use that as a way of finding their own voices and their own narratives. And then we can add those to the collection, which again, is a snapshot. This moment in time, next year, it will be different things maybe being talked about. It's built up very quickly. The British Library Archive, the collection as well, they log our blog that we put on the Library of Congress in Washington, also log our blog as well because it's seen as valuable stuff for researchers. It's connected students and staff to a whole network of people working with zines across America, Europe, Ireland, UK. It's a really their own stories. That's really wonderful. And so if there was no limitation and you had the magic wand, what would you change in education right now? In art and design education, I would take away assessment tomorrow. What I would do is I would keep feedback because I think that's important, but I think the breaking of all... breaking the year into modules and then having numbers on modules, I think you're responding to art and design with maths. And I don't think that's ever going to work. I think you can respond with words and feedback and commentary. But I think what we've done with our education system, and partly it's coming from A-level, is we've made everybody very focused on numerical values. And it makes some sense at A-level when you need a particular quantity of numbers to get into a university. But a university, you leave with whatever particular number and no one cares. It doesn't really matter. What matters is the body of the work that you leave with. And we've just not focused on that. The portfolio is everything. The body of work is everything. And funnily enough, I noticed with MA students, the mature students coming back into education totally get it. They're there for their body of work. Whereas people may be on the... younger end coming through are very much more focused. If I get a distinction, I will succeed. They don't correlate. So that's my... Yeah, I know I can't, but if I could... Is the conditioning from the school though? I think it is. I think partly because it's convenient mass education, isn't it? That everybody goes through at the same time, at the same age. They're not all at the same level. Projects stop and start at the same point. Again, some people aren't ready to stop. They're not ready to start. And I think with sort of BA education, particularly when things are like four weeks or six weeks, start, stop, start, stop, it stops people being able to take the next step or really think about it. I'm thinking like a foundation course where it was a year that was much more fluid. I think actually we really miss those. I think I'm really, I feel that we miss that exploration and excitement from people being a bit more free to explore who they are. I think it helped people pick the right course. coming from A level to the first year, I think it's almost like people take a jump, but it might not be the right jump. Then you have more problems. Absolutely. Not having a compulsive foundation created all kinds of terrible problems in HE. Yeah. I mean, I think it does in a lot of subjects. I think just the age of people when they leave A level, I think foundation science and foundation is good for people going into that field. Foundation art and design, good for people going into the creative practices. I think it's just almost lets people be another year older, another year more confident, you know, they let them explore what they want to explore. And if they've got it wrong, there's still time to change it. Absolutely. But also, you know, there's no time on the degree to get that level of experimentation and exploration that foundation gives. Absolutely. And I mean, we're talking about curriculum framework changes, you know, where I work, and we've been through various changes. Quite often the changes come top down and they're meant for everybody. So again, Portsmouth is about 25,000 students, something like that, you know, all kinds of courses. Of course, one system is not going to suit, you know, the paramedics and the illustrators and the pharmacists and the marine biologists. They're very different. No, but that's why we need to really recognise the independence of the art school. I think we'll never be back there. But I wish we were. I mean, maybe I think, you know, after sort of 15 years of the Tory government, I think art and design has been undermined. You know, generally it's been seen as kind of an uneasy, usually from the kind of voices that as soon as they retire, they take a water color class and go, oh, isn't it lovely? And you think, you know, how dare you? You know, but it's exactly, you know, exactly what I get. And so that idea that it's seen as somehow a... of a hobby course rather than a fundamental part of visual learning. I think visual learning, drawing to decide, you know, to clear your ideas, drawing to discover things is so exciting. And it should be more widely used among all the subjects. I did get to do a nice talk about drawing and the benefits of drawing to sports psychologists and psychologists recently. That was quite exciting. And it was just really quite nice to show how know, once you get over the fear of, oh, I can't draw, which, you know, everybody says, what they mean is I can't draw like I want to draw. I draw like a child because that's when I last drew. So that's, of course, I've stayed the same. But once you got over that and you realize that drawing can be a way of helping you clarify ideas and think and organize information, it suddenly becomes so much more valuable. And I think it should be taught in every subject. So every subject skill, drawing is fundamental and it doesn't need to be a representation. It's just for helping you think. Absolutely. How can our viewers and listeners find you? Easily. So jackbaity.com is a website where I put sort of like a main hub to get to everything else. Baity Jack, just because my name had gone, is on Instagram. When I still hang on Instagram at the moment until that goes horrible, like everything else seems to be going horrible. But probably JackBaty.com, the website, that's where you can find the zines, that's where you can find the artist books, that's where you can find Xenopolis, the zine archive as well, which is worth a visit because there's such a lot of work from such an interesting mix of people across the globe that that's really fascinating to kind of have a dig around for people that enjoy sort of visual narratives. Wow, that's amazing. So any last piece of advice or you know, should like to leave us with? One thing that seems to have come up a bit, just we're talking to the group of MA students that I've got, is it's almost like permission to play seems to be a thing. I think there's so much pressure on younger people at the moment, or people looking like they're going into a career. They're so worried, everyone's so worried about not getting it wrong, that there's almost not a place where you can just play around. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't really matter because it's not going to hurt anyone. And it's okay to do a crappy drawing because we've all done... I've done plenty of crappy drawings of hands. It's absolutely fine. And it's just like permission to mess about a bit. And I think in that space, there's almost like that's where the excitement is. And it's remembering when you were younger and you could just play with felt pens and it felt like a nice thing to do. I think we've almost taken away a little bit of the pleasure in the way that we're constantly pushing people against various metrics, assessments and numbers. It's not healthy. but it's the system we have. Absolutely. Well, thank you ever so much. This has been a really good conversation. Thank you, it'd be nice to have a chat. It was wonderful, and keep it up with the podcast in the world. Thank you, thank you. Bye. Cheers.