Continuing our creative practice series, Lea Cooper discusses and shares images of their PhD work, in which zine making was both research method and research focus.
It is 10 years today (4 March 2024) since I was last sectioned (4 March 2014). I wanted to do something to mark it. I wanted somewhere to go, a monument, a memorial, which I could visit and then walk away from and forget about, safe in the knowledge that it was marked somewhere and that this held the memory and the meaning of this moment in my life. I accept that it is egotistical to imagine anyone would erect an obelisk to mark my trauma, but honestly I would settle for something more general, a national site, a Mad Cenotaph.
– Cooper, 2024a, 1
This article considers multiple traces of the exploration of the question of ‘Mad memorials’ across my work, including my PhD thesis The zINe-Between: A Creative Practice Exploration of Health, Liminality, Lived Experience and the Zines in Wellcome Collection (Cooper 2024a), the zine A Place of Honor (Cooper 2024b), and the textile work This is Not a Place of Safety (Cooper 2024c).
In my PhD research, I worked with Wellcome Collection’s 1,300-plus zines around health. It was both a practice-based project, which used zine making as method, and a practice-led one, which generated new knowledge about zine making itself.
The resulting project is composed of two interwoven parts: a collection of 14 original zines created over its duration and an accompanying critical thesis. The thesis is just one trace of both research practices (reading, academic writing, autoethnography) and zine practices (reading, zine writing and assembling, reproduction and distribution). The 14 zines offer another, different, trace of these same zine and research practices.
‘A Place of Honour’
The zine A Place of Honour (Cooper 2024b), came out of a straightforward question. On March 4 2024, it was going to be 10 years since I was last detained under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act (or ‘sectioned’). I knew I wanted to mark this, but I didn’t know how. To begin to approach this question I adopted the same scavenger methodology (Niang 2024) as I was using in my PhD research: I asked Mad Twitter if anyone knew of any examples of memorials; I returned to Ann Cvetkovich’s Archives of Feeling (Cvetokovich 2003); I spoke about it with my therapist; I started looking out for zines about grief and mourning at zine fairs. The reflections and research that resulted were assembled into the zine.
The question also started to shape the direction of my PhD research, and I turned in a more intentional way towards questions of grief and memorial, particularly in exploring Covid zines and zines as crip doulas. The question of a Mad memorial extended, became a rhizomatic sprawl, because it was also a question about how to grieve without an end, without closure or justice, about how to organise from a place of grief, and how to contend with the politics of remembering that threatens to consign the harm, loss and trauma to the past. These are questions that concern more than just Mad people.
The zine Sore Loser: a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief (Alland and Hernández 2021) expresses a need for cultural forms that can hold unfinished grief, without resolution. Sandra Alland and Etzali Hernández’s question of how we begin to mourn the losses experienced as a result of Covid suggests the difficulty of even starting mourning – in part, because we are not finished losing. Sore Loser demonstrates a need to explore cultural expressions of grief beyond static memorial, closure, and the potential of zines for this.
The capacity to grieve as essential to social change
In many ways (in all ways) it is a profoundly selfish fantasy. I want to bury it, of course I do. I want to perform a ritual to consign it to the past, to pass through, and then engage in an annual performance of remembering. This is selfish because to locate this trauma in the past would be to ignore the present. I am writing this as it continues, it keeps happening, again and again (to other people this time). What would it mean to create a memorial to being sectioned whilst people continue to be sectioned? Why wouldn’t we use the stone and marble for something more functional (a battering ram)?
– Cooper, 2024a, 3
In their online article ‘Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace it?’, offered as further reading at the end of Sore Loser, poet and media activist Malkia Devich-Cyril (2021) suggests that the ‘capacity to grieve’ is vital to the work necessary in the political state of interregnum to bring about social change, to create the futures that are not guaranteed in a liminality without a clear destination. Sore Loser suggests how zines can contribute to ‘build[ing] a movement with the capacity to grieve’ (Malkia Devich-Cyril 2021). It demonstrates how zines can figure in the work of finding ways to ‘develop resilient adaptations that increase the elasticity of our responses to loss’.
In Aisha Mizra’s (2024) ‘fagony aunt’ article about Covid and grief on gal-dem, also included in Sore Loser’s further reading, they describe how ‘the lack of acknowledgment of grief is a tool of civil control used to gaslight the masses into believing there is nothing missing, but we know better’. The UK Commission on Covid Commemoration is concerned both with remembering only certain parts of the Covid pandemic, and through this ‘remembering’ creating a particular temporality of Covid, one which locates it in the past. The grief articulated by Sore Loser is powerful because it names what has been lost, what is missing, and refuses a smoothing over of these losses through memorial, or a temporality that locates those losses in the past, rather than as ongoing. A Mad Cenotaph might be personally appealing, but I know it would be recruited into a temporality of psychiatric harm that locates it in the past.
Memorial as Fantasy
‘I have been thinking about a memorial or monument as:
- A fantasy: of justice or vengeance; of writing history; of a singular contained and static site of remembering.
- A wound that never heals, located outside the body, outside the home. A solution to the problem that I want it to hurt the same every time but I don’t want it to hurt like this all the time.
- A container: a vessel where I can put all this so I can stop holding it; an urn.
I have been imagining a memorial or monument as:
- A plinth (a towering obelisk)
- A plinth (a flat topped column that holds a statue)
- An Altar (a table that you place offerings on)
- An Archive (a collection of objects; a site of personal/cultural memory)’
– Cooper 2024a, 3
Over February, a bulb that has lain dormant starts to sprout, grow leaves, bud. By March, it is in full flower. Winter passes into Spring passes into Summer, and the bulb dies back into dormancy, but it is still there, underground.
On 4 March 2024, I created a series of cyanotypes of snowdrops I’d picked on a walk around Kirkcaldy. Cyanotype is a slow-reacting, light-sensitive photographic printing fluid that produces images of a distinctive dark blue. It was historically a method for reproducing blueprints. As I explain in the zine: ‘I decided that I’d use these to somehow hold onto something from today in a way that isn’t replicable. Like those fucking corny “this is what the stars looked like the moment you were born”’ (Cooper 2024b, 10).
This exploration of mad memorials continued into other forms. Out of Sight, Out of Mind is an annual exhibition of artworks by people with ‘experience of mental health issues’, organised by CAPS Edinburgh as part of an art-as-advocacy project. It is held at Summerhall, a sprawling arts venue in Edinburgh, which used to be a veterinary school. For the 2024 exhibition, I made a piece which exploited the tall ceilings and allowed me to further explore what a mad memorial could look like.
Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are communication attempts intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, 10,000-plus years from now. They take the form of written messages, pictograms, and other more creative solutions (big spikes! radioactive cats!). They address the question: how can we tell people, far in the future, that this thing, buried deep in the ground, is still dangerous? It will always be dangerous.
A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories gave the following wording as an example of what any series of non-linguistic waste warning messages should evoke:
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
– Cooper 2024b, 8
‘This is Not a Place of Safety’
In A Place of Honour (Cooper 2024b) I wondered what wording I would use as an example of what I want my Mad monument to evoke: This place is not a place of safety. In the textile work This is Not a Place of Safety (Cooper 2024c) I began to feel this out.
Three semi-translucent curtains hang in a row, each over two metres in height. The two outer curtains have an image of a Giant Hogweed printed on them using cyanotype. The Giant Hogweed has been drawn with acrylic paint markers on a large sheet of clear plastic vinyl. This has then been laid over the curtains, which were treated with cyanotype liquid the night before, in the dark of my garden, and exposed to sunlight. Where the sun hits the curtain, they turn dark blue; where the paint casts a shadow, the curtain stays white. The sap of Giant Hogweed is phototoxic, causing blisters and scars. These invasive plants grow tall along a piece of wasteland on the shore of the Firth of Forth where I live.
The central curtain, guarded by the Giant Hogweed, is a more complicated design made up of three horizontal panels. It incorporates the blueprints of Fulbourn asylum – the modern hospital built next door is where I spent most of my time as a psychiatric patient. Within frames that fan out from the blueprint of the central buildings are assorted images, each with their own meaning or connection to my experiences in hospital.
In two days, it will be 11 years since I was last sectioned. I haven’t yet answered the question of how to mark this, but it’s happening either way. My thesis, zine, textiles, all offer a material record of processes of investigation, of knowledge production. I still don’t know what to do but I will continue to research and create, weaving theory and practice, trying to make sense of it in my life and work.
About the author
Lilith (Lea, as in sea) Cooper is an artist, researcher and DIY cultural organiser based in Kirkcaldy, Fife. In 2024 they completed a PhD between the University of Kent and Wellcome Collection, working with Wellcome’s zines around health, illness and disability. They have since curated an exhibition based on this research, ‘Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice’, open at Wellcome Collection in London until 14 September 2025. Find them at www.zinejam.com or on Instagram at @zine_jam.
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography, or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
References
Alland, Sandra and Hernández, Etzali. 2021. Sore Loser: a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief. Zine.
Cooper, Lea. 2024. ‘The zINe-Between: A Creative Practice Exploration of Health, Liminality, Lived Experience and the Zines in Wellcome Collection’. PhD Thesis, University of Kent.
Cooper, Lea. 2024. A Place of Honour. Zine.
Cooper, Lea. 2024. This is Not a Place of Safety. Textile work.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press.
Device-Cyril, Malkia. 2021. ‘Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?’ In These Times, 28 July 2021. https://inthesetimes.com/article/freedom-grief-healing-death-liberation-movements. Accessed 11 April 2024.
Mirza, Aisha. 2020. ‘Queeries: everything is going back to normal but what do I do with all this grief?’ Gal-Dem, 24 July 2020. https://gal-dem.com/queeries-everything-is-going-back-to-normal-but-what-do-i-do-with-all-this-grief/. Accessed 11 April 2024.
Niang, Sophie Marie. 2024. ‘in defence of what’s there: notes on scavenging as methodology.’ Feminist Review, 136.1, pp. 52-66. doi:10.1177/01417789231222606.
Trauth, Kathleen M.; Stephen C. Hora & Robert V. Guzowski. 1993. ‘Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.’ Report, United States Department of Energy, November 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/. Accessed 03 March 2025.
UK Commission on Covid Commemoration. 2023. ‘Commission recommends how Covid pandemic should be remembered across the UK,’. gov.uk, 18 September 2023. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/commission-recommends-how-covid-pandemic-should-be-remembered-across-the-uk. accessed 11 April 2024.
