SHE WANTS IT ALL TO GO BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS BEFORE
Printmaker
Zine Maker
Pippa Healy is a photographic artist based in London. Her practice is primarily diaristic and is concerned with themes around loss, longing, violence, and grief. She works with both analogue and digital photography as well as printmaking techniques including screen-printing and photopolymer.
Her handmade zines, often raw, abject, and diaristic in style, are central to her practice. They are held in the Tate Gallery collection, the Martin Parr Foundation, and the Self Publish Be Happy archive, which is housed in the MEP in Paris.
A career highlight was showing her series Sick at Festival Circulation(s) in Paris in 2019. She studied photography at UAL Central St Martins and graduated with a distinction from Westminster University in MA Photographic Studies. In 2020 she graduated from UAL Camberwell with a distinction in MA Printmaking. She was the recipient of the 2020 Bainbridge Studio Prize and was a finalist for The Signature Art Prize 2021. She is currently studying at UEL for a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art.
Tell us about your greatest inspirations and influences.
From an early age I was obsessed with magazines. I loved the juxtaposition of image and text. My grandmother would buy me i-D Magazine and Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, and I would spend hours designing my own magazines with Letraset and collaging magazine pages.
As a teenager I was drawn to hip hop culture and the art of Keith Haring. I also loved the 1980s fly girl and b-boy street images of Janette Beckman. 1970s New York is somewhere I would have liked to have lived.
Artists such as Barbara Kruger, Nan Goldin, Jo Spence, Marina Abramovic, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rinko Kawauchi are very influential in my practice. I am influenced by the world around me, from TikTok to Susan Sontag. I consume both high and low culture. This is important.
I have many inspirational female friends who are photographers and writers. These people help me to keep pushing my practice. They are very supportive.
How are current trends in technology and innovation affecting your work?
I am excited by technology, by new ways of making work. In my own practice I have recently been pushing photographic images further by using digital apps. We live our lives jumping between the virtual and real world. In my new series I Want It All to Go Back to the Way It Was Before I used a glitch app to edit my images whilst walking. I enjoy playing with images, to create new outcomes from a photographic image.
Tell us more about your creative process.
My work often starts with images and text I make on my iPhone. My phone is a visual diary. I take many images, often snapshots, and save them in albums. I write text and save this in my notes. I never know what may start a series, but by banking these images and text I have a library I can draw on for inspiration.
I will then start a series and join my thoughts together. The series will often take on a life of its own. I can feel the images coming together through making photobooks or zines. Then I feel an immediacy to share with the world.
What do you think of the art world and how it works?
The art world is fascinating. I have spent many years in education, and the difference between making work and showing it within an institution versus the art world is huge. Once you start to show work professionally you realise quickly that you can start to break the rules.
I enjoy showing work on alternative platforms, making zines rather than expensive photobooks. I want my work to be seen, so I take opportunities to show it from guerrilla flyposting exhibitions to once showing work in someone's apartment which turned into a gallery for the night. The art world is what you make of it.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
Wellbeing is incredibly important. As an artist you spend many hours alone thinking and making work, which can be very isolating. It is important for me to get outside and walk and talk with friends. My favourite walk is around the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.
I enjoy cycling and running, but I am probably happiest dressed in a wetsuit body-boarding in Cornwall. I like to be taken by the elements and thrown around in the sea.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Don't compete or compare. Supporting your peers' work is the best way of developing your own.
Culture
Martin Parr Foundation
MEP Paris
Self Publish Be Happy
Pippa began her relationship with zine-making through a course at the V&A with Paula Roush, who runs her own studio and press. Roush taught her to make her first zine, which was a mash-up of two projects in one book. Pippa found that to be a genuinely interesting way of working: the friction of two separate bodies of work forced into the same spine.
She was also deeply interested in skateboarding culture and music, where zines have always been central. The DIY distribution model of that world made immediate sense to her: something small that you can give to people, they can put it in their bag, and it is cheap. Not hung up on selling work for hundreds of pounds. Just wanting it to be seen.
"I felt that if I could make something small, that I could distribute and allow me to show people my work, that would be the ideal way of doing it."
Stay curious,
From the series “ I want it all to go back to the way it was before” Courtesy of the artist
From the series “ The Lake”
Nearly There from the series “ The Lake” Courtesy of the artist
Portrait of the artist, by Lara Capelli