Talking Seen&Heard w/ Erin O'Brien

We are beyond thrilled to be collaborating with Seen&Heard for their very first event this Saturday 14 July at the Red Rattler Theatre.

This special event is to celebrate the launch of the first Seen&Heard zine and cassette, and will showcase readings, music, & art by women, trans, non-binary and gender diverse people who are doing interesting, exciting, and creative things in Australia. Full event details are on facebook and on our website.

We caught up with Seen&Heard organiser, Erin O'Brien, for some quick questions.

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What was the impetus for starting Seen&Heard?

Mikhaila had moved to Sydney from Canberra after completing her visual art degree. She was a really active photographer when living in Canberra but had found since moving to Sydney she hadn’t been as creative or motivated. She reached out to me to work on a project with her and as she shoots mostly portraits she wanted to do a series of portraits of women and queer people in the creative scene in Sydney. I love collaborating and the content was definitely something I was interested in, so we just started throwing some more ideas around together.

Tell us a bit about the project. Was there a reason why you & Mikhaila chose the mediums of zine and cassette?

Mikhaila always wanted to interview the subjects of the portraits and we discussed compiling the entire thing into a zine because zines are more my ballpark. I’m a huge fan of Mikhaila’s work and think that a project like this deserves a big platform so I just started snowballing ideas of how to make it accessible to more people. We always had the idea to set up a bandcamp or have music available from some of the people included in the project, but when I started thinking more about that, the idea just grew in my mind. I thought it would be fitting and a great idea to launch the project with a show and also to put together a mixtape because I’m really into things being tactile and tangible. My background is print media and I love things you can hold and interact with - so a zine and a cassette make sense in that regard. Also because Mikhaila shoots large format analogue film, the best way to view these images is actually like that - so we are putting together an exhibition as well which will be taking place at Tekminimal gallery in Leichhardt from the 27th July.

What can we look forward to in the future from Seen&Heard?

Keep an eye out for further details about our exhibition - you’re definitely going to want to see these images large format because they are stunning. We’re definitely looking at doing an ongoing publication of sorts - just not of this magnitude. We’ve been working on this first issue for the better part of a year, and we are so proud of how it’s all come together - but it is huge. We want to continue to produce this publication and feature women, trans, non binary and queer artists and people and will probably aim to do a quarterly physical copy, as well as ongoing content on our website. Also who knows - maybe we will keep making mixtapes and other releases like that? They are really fun to produce.

Seen&Heard launches this Saturday night in Marrickville. Full details here.

Read interviews with artists and find out more about Seen&Heard at their website.