The Underpass: creative connections and our biggest ever sale
How can we build creative connections in our community? Also, the buy all our shit sale!
The Underpass is our monthly round-up, detailing what’s been happening at EXIT Press, what we’re working on, and introducing you to new artists you might not know.
Building creative connections
christian kitson
We’ve given a brief introduction to how and why we started publishing LOST FUTURES, but a lot of it was giving ourselves the chance to put our work out there. We’d done The Artist’s Way, and were in the lockdown limbo of ‘what next?’ kieran and I had both written on and off since school, but neither of us had made much of an effort to really get our writing out into the world. The idea mortified me. I was reminded of something my first therapist said to me, the simple directive to ‘feel the fear, and do it anyway’, and together, that’s what we decided to do, steering into the skid, printing our own work and extending a hand to others who wanted to join us.
We try to ensure we charge a fair price for the work we publish in print - just enough to cover our printing costs, and any profit split equally between all of our contributors. Our raison d'être, though, has always been to bring attention to art and voices that might otherwise not be seen or heard. We don’t charge for submissions, we’ve always tried to accept the largest volume of submissions we can, and we try to have the lightest submission process possible. We want to be the first port of call for fresh, new artists just dipping their toe into the waters of sharing their work for the first time. And now, with our Substack, we can do that for free - a lighter submission process, no costs to us, and no cost to you.
We’re trying to build creative connections in the EXIT Press community. Alongside our regular posts, which will start to feature your submissions very soon, this monthly newsletter will introduce you to one new artist you might know, and will feature a community notice board. Got something you want to promote? Have you just released a new zine, or want to promote your album for Bandcamp Friday? Send us an email with anything you want to tell people about or want to promote, and if it’s value-aligned and fits, we’ll include it in our next edition of The Underpass.
Introducing… eve michell
As you may have seen from our posts on Substack and on social media, our longtime friend and collaborator eve michell has joined the team as an editor and communications lead.
eve is a copywriter, poet and artist who writes about tech by day, and desire, trauma, and other more personal subjects by night. kieran bugged eve to talk a little about why art and small presses are so important to her:
Art has been important to me from a young age, because my grandma and uncle were both artists – painters and potters. My dad is a writer and my mum is a seamstress, so I’ve always been surrounded by creatives. It’s something that’s passed down by both sides of the family. I see art as a way to turn ideas into objects, and therefore make meaning from them. It’s easier to create meaning from something tangible.§
I’m interested in art that comes from an experiential perspective – so, as I said in my post the other day, my work revolves around dysfunction, desire, queerness and transgression, because I’m a queer, desiring, dysfunctional, occasionally transgressive person, and I like my work to communicate that. The dysfunction, for example, relates to my experience of having an eating disorder, being an anxious and depressed teenager, and the fallout of sexual trauma. I find it really therapeutic to immerse myself in the process of making art about that.
I love the shift away from mass-market, corporate art. There’s a place for it, sure, but it’s often riddled with censorship, elitism, appropriation and misogynoir. I think being involved in a small press gives you a lot more agency to broaden the scope of who and what you’re publishing, and take back some of that control. I’m a big fan of Virginia Woolf’s work, so I kind of see it like Hogarth Press: this really grassroots, community-based project, publishing the voices that need to be heard.
Best of the month
eve michell shared her visual art meets poetry piece Spilled ink, which reflected on her eighteen months of art therapy and premature endings
kieran cutting welcomed us to EXIT Signs, giving a sense of what the platform is going to be and why the hell we’re here
Our call for submissions went live, and we’ve already started sorting through the first batch!
Sale now on
We’ve been doing this for two years now, and only our first issue has sold out. We’d really like to stop hoarding our stock, so we cordially invite you to the buy all our shit so we can get our shelves back sale!
For just one week (until December 13th), you can get everything we’ve ever made* for £15. Or, if you’ve recently found us through thresholds, you can get all of the back issues* for £10.
For £15, you’re going to get LOST FUTURES volumes 2,3, and 4, and We can collect the keys by Clive Judd and Patrick Wray. That’s 224 pages of art and writing from almost 75 different artists and authors. 6p a page or 20p an artist, take your pick.
This is the most we’ve ever discounted our stock, and we don’t anticipate doing it again any time soon, so help a small press out this Christmas and buy all our shit. Or buy the full works* for a friend who would love our flavour of weird. Or give it to your office Secret Santa because you really don’t know what to get Karen this year.