UCA helps shape Wellcome Collection’s
Covid-related donations

MA Illustration graduates have collaborated with ‘zine librarians Loesja Vigour and Nicola Cook from the library at Wellcome Collection to create a set of posterzines to reflect the theme of ‘Contact’.

08 Oct 2021

A posterzine reads like a mini-magazine but folds out into a poster. This innovative format with its unofficial, unedited and DIY ethos, often gives a voice to the underrepresented lived experiences.

Over the past year, like most places in the UK, Wellcome’s public buildings have been closed – meaning the library hasn’t been able to collect and make available new materials for their collections. As a result, they shifted their collecting strategies, and one way they’ve captured material emerging on Covid-19, the various nationwide lockdowns and pandemic life in general, is through the immediacy of ephemera and self-publishing like zines. And, collaborating with our UCA students was one of the unique ways in which to do this.

In response to the brief, MA students produced an array of imaginative and useful posterzines that poignantly revealed both the personal and communal experience of living through the current global situation and helped shed light on health or social disparities or gave radical instruction to community care.

Michael Nicholson, Senior Lecturer of MA Illustration, said: “Loesja and Nicola were delighted with the results. We had a lot of exciting work from the year group. It showed how the creativity of our students could capture aspects of the global pandemic that reflected the commonality of human experiences.”

You & me by Yiyi Huang, The other by Nika Mamedova, New normal by Georgia Sheppard, and Contact by Keng-Ju Sung are some of the works that you can now view in the library’s collection.

©Nika Mamedova