Study Task 7- Interviewing Kristyna

On March the 8th I attended the Girlgang international womens day seminar event (which was amazing and so inspiring!) but whilst I was there I was lucky enough to get the chance to speak to Kristyna Baczynski:


Me: Hello! Firstly I'd like to ask you, I'm in a bit of a creative slump at the minute, and I really don't know how to get out of it. Is there anything you recommend or anything that you do in that situation? 

Kristyna: trust your process, try things, experiment, find something that relaxes you and try and connect that with your art. So if you're fed up of looking at paper, do something new. If you love cutting paper, do that, if you love ink, do that! Try and like build into your process and your practice with stuff that you find comforting and enjoyable. That darkness and that self doubt, is toxic, and you need to balance that with like joy and love and play to put out that fire. Because that stuff trumps this stuff *motioning with arms* and that's what you want, that's why you're here, that's why you're going to university. You've got to protect this magical little plant and give it light and don't let that darkness get to it. So feed that thing, not that thing. Its about balancing those two things, the bad one never goes away! But don't let it kill the good one, cause then you stop making art and be a business analyst or something 

How did you begin doing what your practice is now? Did it shape up from your first early days at uni?

Erm so, like I thought I wanted to do gig posters cause I was super into rock and roll maaaaan so I was like really into screen printed gig posters and that's why I started doing art foundation and was really into music in Leeds. Started working in the record shop, and was super into like weird black metal and hardcore punk and like dude bro music cause it was early 2000's. So I knew i wanted to be in Leeds cause I worked in Leeds, and I lived in Huddersfield so then I applied to go to Leeds after my art foundation, and I kind of knew I wanted to print making and design within illustration but I didn't really know what. So I joined a multi-disciplinary course, I did graphic arts and design so I knew I could spend three years trying lots of stuff rather than at 18-19 I didn't know I definitely wanted to be an illustrator yet so I did something broader. 

yeah that's very young to have your mind made up like that isn't it?

oh hell yeah, I say go away for a bit, being on the receiving end as a lecturer the students that have spent a bit of time, are infinitely more kind of nurtured and nourished when they do come to it. So any life experience that you've had like coming from a different country or spending a year doing something else, working in retail and realising that you hate it. Its good, its so good just being a person for a while, erm so I dropped out of my A-levels as well, lost my mind, took a lot of drugs and then went back to art school. Erm, and then I kind of got all that teenage rebellion out of my system so when I was at uni, I was kind of doing a bit of everything for a couple of years. And then in second year I started doing a bit of animation, and then that led to comics because it was sequential. But I did animation mostly at uni, when I graduated my film won an award, i got £1000 pounds, and it was the first I'd ever been payed for my work. I've got like a little glass award with my name carved in it, its crazy. So off the back of that because it was animation and I won the award I got some real freelance storyboarding work, storyboarding animations for like, an E-greetings like website, it was weird... But it was kind of semi-regular work and it meant that I had to get self employed because i was like, having to write invoices and work out my hourly rate and I was like ermm... £12 an hour? hahaha, "MUM how do I do an invoice?!" like, luckily my Godfather is an accountant, he's called Vern, he's still my accountant! So he helped me get set up self employed, helped me do my first tax return and then from that point I had a business, so it started off as being animation and storyboarding. After I graduated I did like, everybody moved away and I didn't have like that network of people being like "What you making? What you doing today? Tell me about your project" Nobody was interested, So I was like I don't have anything I don't have a network or community. So I got a blog! Which was proto-Internet so it was basically a Myspace, having a website wasn't part of my degree. So then I started publishing and sharing my work, finding new places to share my work. But a big change was me signing up to do Thought Bubble, I got a table there with my friend, and I'd booked it in May, so I knew that in November I had to fill this much space with my stuff. And I still had my uni card that was pushing out free prints! So I made a lot of stuff, zines, prints. Having access to a free printer or print card by the way, has been a huge part of my life, I've always managed to have a job that has given me access to cheap or free printing. And then getting my own printer was a big part of that. So making zines and prints to make was so much fun and selling them at thought bubble, people taking them away. That made me think oh I can actually do this because it was a direct audience, and people saying "I like your work, here's £2"

its like instant gratification isn't it?

Yeah totally! and I think you can get that online now, in other ways but to me that was the first instance of it, so I guess like graduating and winning that award, and having that money gave me that push to be self employed and then doing a kind of arts fair or comics fair and having that push to make products that I could sell kind of taught me a lot. And I think between those two things that's where like the year that i sorted my shit out and went from being a student to having a business or self employed or whatever, even though I had part time jobs, its still the same business. That's been a continuous line from when I graduated to now. 

Wow that's huge, that's so successful pretty much straight out of uni as well

Well on top of that I was waitressing and working at the art gallery

Oh OK, to sort of fund all the other stuff?

Yeah, so I sort of split my time and did what I needed to do to make rent and have the time to make weird art. And sometimes my freelance stuff was working for clients and storyboarding, sometimes it was doing thought bubble and making £300 in cash! And just being like "SHITTT YEHHH" loosing my mind, like OH MY GOD I can win the world! Between those things I think prioritising what I wanted to do more and less of, 

What equipment would you say is necessary if you're gonna be a self employed illustrator?
cause I've been outsourcing a lot of stuff like badges and stuff, but printers and things?

I'm constantly changing stuff up, so erm, I've had a colour printer, at the moment I've got a monprinter which just prints black and white. So I print black and white onto coloured sticker paper, coloured paper, rainbow paper. Or just black and white zines, but its cheap to run, and I'm interested in limited colour palettes anyway so it works. And it prints the black and white master copies for my riso printer, erm which has broken. But for a few years I was just using that everyday I LOVED it. 

I got really obsessed with the riso zines you were making!

Thank you! I got really obsessed with the process of making them! But those things, I don't think you need them, I think you need access to some kind of cheap means of production. It gets icky cause I know how cheaply I can make things for myself, and to then pay someone else to do it I'm like "You guys are making a neat profit off that". If I'm selling a £3 zine I don't wanna spend £1 making it, I wanna spend £20 making it! That's way more money for me if I'm making 100-500 if these things, that's much more reasonable. So i think finding a printer that you trust if you re outsourcing or club together and work collectively to buy a badge machine? You wont be using it 24 hours a day everyday, but if theres 10 of you and you all put in 8 quid and you get an £80 badge machine, then throughout the year you're gonna make that money back. I sound like I'm trying to sell you a time share in Spain!

I mean, its working, I would buy it! 

You should do that, I think theres ways around it collaboratively if you do wanna invest in cheap means of production between you. But yeah I think, my husband hates the fact that I spend most of the time stapling zines while hes watching TV, but I love it cause those zines are really cheap and I know I can sell them all. But he's like cause I work 40 hours a week, making stuff all the time and I work weekends and whatever to make work that in the evening if I'm also working stapling zines then that's like, you're gonna die. So theres a level of how much time you've got to actually make stuff as well. Cause It takes you a day to make the physical stuff and if you're full time, its time you could be drawing or something. So again that's about balance, sometimes I like just listening to podcasts and mindlessly stapling zines though

I suppose after you've been concentrating, more monotonous task like that are good relief!

Yeah and I don't mind it, I draw comics so I draw the same person 100 times! I don't mind that, but it could drive somebody else crazy. So that's fine. But I don't think theres anything essential that you need, if you don't want to make comics or printmaking then pay somebody else to do it, if you've go the money to pay someone else then do it, if you don't then be resourceful, hustle, figure out ways to do it cheaply. Get jobs and work places that help you, I used to work at awesome merch so I used to get 50% off all my printing. But that's why I worked there! Theres always ways to get around it, but I don't mind kind of hustling work that way, I always feel like being a freelancer you've got to spin a lot of plates. Its only if you're finding you use something a lot and its becoming an overhead that its worth investing I think. I used to pay Footprint in Leeds a lot to print my riso zines and i was getting like 500 done at a time. So I took the money I would use doing a print run and spent it on my riso from E-bay and was able to print an infinite amount of zines! I mean it turned out not to be because it died after two and a half year but it had two years of sweet sweet zine making where I made thousands of zines! So it made sense at the time, but now I'm so busy that I don't have time anyway. But yeah, did I answer your question?

You did! and it brings me nicely into my next one... What, how do you balance being like an admin and business person with staying creative? Because even like in my degree, I find that hard, with paperwork and evaluations and stuff and then getting home and being like "oh now I have to make something" 

Yeah, I'm pretty shit at it sometimes, I know at the moment my tax returns been on my to-do list since October! But I always push the deadline like I only did it in January, so theres stuff I just don't do, and it depends how busy I am at the moment, I'm working on my first graphic novel and my first children's book so I'm not answering my emails as quickly as I should. And I know I'm not doing it so I have to do it on a Sunday or like when I've got a bit of breathing room and I'm lazy with it sometimes. But generally I know that the first few hours of the day I'm a bit lazy and slow unless I'm picking up something that I left unfinished the day before. So that's when I do all my emails, try and catch up on my Etsy stuff, chasing invoices, that kind of stuff. If not that gets left to Sunday, like chilled out Sunday morning, get up late, have a coffee, like a sunny morning in the studio. It feels less intense than being like "I've got all these shitty emails to respond to AND all this work to do ughhhhh". I work from home so I tend to like not mind working on the weekends, some people have to draw a line, but I do let it slip. Sometimes I get to the point where I have to do it and that's when I do it. But you kind of have to get to know you're own bad habits, and know when you're lazy and be self aware. Even then I can still be forgetful and things can still slip, like today I'm sorry I totally forgot about this cause it was a while ago! But it all came back to me, sometimes I don't have the time to do those interviews or write those emails. But if you sent me this in an email I could have spend a day responding cause I want it to be perfect, so I'd much rather talk to you, a real human. That was an admin choice for me, I don't have that half day to spare but I'll be at this thing and I can give you half an hour of my time, to properly talk about it. Its all trial and error and hustle. Always working towards that positive change. 

So I think that's about it, just one more thing, sorry! I've been asked to do work experience in the summer, is there anyone who you think it might be worth approaching, or for advice before leaving uni? 

I guess its just making sure, placements and internships are fucking dangerous because some of the people that offer them are basically endorsing free labour. And un payed work in illustration devalues the work that everyone does and people that prey on students and graduates and ask them to do work for free or offer exposure. When you get ten years down the line people will still be asking you to do work for free, and you'll think I'm a decade into my career, this is insulting and somehow you think its OK? And it happens a lot of the time to a lot of people, so that's a fire that needs putting out, its a barrel of snakes! My advice would be go in knowing exactly what you want to get out of it. Don't neglect that side of it because that's what you get out of it, that's your payment. Its way more than just ticking it off your to-do list, its important, that's three weeks of your time that's hella precious. So if you're interested in printmaking go to a print makers, so I would be more interested in going to workers cooperatives, because they are people that are inherently radical, anti-capitalist. They pay their workers a living wage, so their much more likely to treat you fairly, and like make sure their ethically aware of what their doing. So I guess Wharf chambers are a cooperative, see if they need any design stuff, Footprint are, just get in touch with them. Anything radical, anything feminist, anything coop is always a positive. 


In conclusion: This talk with Kristyna was more helpful and rewarding than I hoped it would be, not only was it incredibly enriching to talk to someone some switched on and great at what they do, it was really comforting to speak to her knowing that at some point in her life she was a student in a similar position to me. Its obvious from talking to her that she's an absolute grafter and this is part of the reason she's achieves what she achieves, its obvious when talking to her that she attributes much of her success to how much time and effort she ploughs into her practice. This made me more motivated to motivate myself and examine what I'm doing, how much I'm doing, and how effectively its working to benefit me. Speaking with Kristyna also made me a lot less worried about how I would survive as a self employed person straight out of university, and has made me think more realistically about getting a part time job in order to fund my practice. I will be looking for jobs in print workshops and merchandise companies in order to hopefully cut down on my printing costs too. The most valuable thing I've taken away from this interview is that, when things are seeming like a bit too much and I'm having a creative crisis, the only solution is to throw myself into my work more and try and make something I'm happy with. The reason she has such a wide and beautiful portfolio is because she's dedicated and committed to the making and crafting of things. That's something I always forget how to do when I'm having a panic, but if in doubt in future I will try to remember to keep making.

Study Task 6- Haiku

My Final Haiku:

Give help and support, 
break mental health stigma,
if your brains muddled.

Our final Haiku(s):

Muddle collective;
an open conversation,
to break the stigma.

OR

A self care network,
an open conversation,
to break the stigma.

Muddle Collective- Planning

New group/collective name: Muddle Collective

Refined proposal:

• we will focusing our ideas down on creating a student society for our university that supports and educates around the topic of mental health and provides guidance and support to those who need it 
• we intend to make a small, educative zine which people can take away with them to learn about different mental health issues and possibly get some help from this 
• this zine will be informal, and written for students, by students so it will not sounds condescending or too full of scientific jargon
• it could also be sold out of uni to those who need it
• we would charge for both the zine and a small annual joining fee for the society, both of which should cover the costs of running the society and hopefully make us a small profit
• our USP is that there is very few university's that currently have mental health societies and LUA doesn't have one at all yet
• we aim to establish a "nib it in the bud" approach to mental health education, giving people the tools to identify when they're struggling and why, and also what options are open to them in this case