The exhibition runs from 14th March to 14th September 2025 and looks at how zines have been used to share experiences of disability and disabled identity. The Zine Maker zine will be near the start of the exhibition, as part of an introduction to what zines are and why they are particularly relevant to themes of disability (as well as madness/trauma, queerness, and marginalisation more broadly).

The Zines Forever! exhibition is curated by Dr Lea Cooper (artist and zinemaker), and Adam Rose (Assistant Curator, Wellcome Collection).

If you can’t make the exhibition, you can access the Zine Maker zine here. It introduces  zines and zine culture, and takes you through a workshop style session to make and plan your own zines.

As well as accessing our zines through this website, you can now find most of them in the Wellcome Collection, along with some of our other resources.

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The first zine explored the meanings of queerness, creativity, and health, and what might be gained by bringing these things together. It invited readers into various queer creative health practices at the level of their bodyminds, their relationships, and their wider ecosystems.

This second zine invites us to consider what it would mean to ‘reasearch ourselves’ alongside – or instead of – external researchers studying queer experience. Many creative, spiritual, activist, and therapeutic traditions encourage such forms of self-exploration, into our gender and sexuality, and our experiences of ourselves beyond this.

Queer Creative Health 2 explores how we might research: how we identify ourselves and name our experiences, how our bodyminds work, what forms of care, creativity, and collectivity work for us, and how we relate to our wider ecosystems. Woven throughout is an exploration of collective and personal trauma, and the value of slowness.

You can download the pdf of the zine here. If you read the zine online you can click on the links to connect to all the resources mentioned.

Zeena Feldman has written a lovely review of the zines over on The Polyphony:

Zeena Feldman reviews Queer Creative Health, a zine series by Meg-John Barker produced for and with London-based LGBTQ+ charity Queercircle.

I am an academic. My professional culture is one of seriousness. It is a culture that asserts authority through empiricism and peer-review. It traffics in the language of objectivity and highly credentialled expertise. It isn’t a scene easily associated with playfulness or accessibility. Which is a shame because I like playfulness. And I don’t think one should need a PhD to lay claim to knowledge. This is why I love zines.

In many ways, zines are everything academia isn’t. They’re democratic. They’re radical. And they most definitely are not interested in respectability. Zines are teenage protest, insistent on liberation here and now, with no fucks to give. They are the antithesis of journal articles, which give middle age vibes, steeped in carefulness and a perennial insistence that more research is needed.

Or so I thought until I read Meg-John Barker’s just-published Queer Creative Health 2: Researching Ourselves (2025) and its predecessor, Queer Creative Health 1 (2023). These zines manage an unexpected hat trick: seamlessly combining emancipatory politics and a DIY ethic with research rigour and care. The zines are fun but they’re also earnest. Barker is a writer and zine maker, a former therapist and a recovering academic (my words, not theirs) who has published extensively on sex, gender and relationships. In other words, someone well-practiced in guiding people along difficult corridors of thought, tenderly.

They created Queer Creative Health (QHC) for and with Queercircle, a Greenwich-based LGBTQ+ charity that “believe(s) in the radical potential of the arts for individual, collective and societal transformation”. Queercircle calls itself an “organisation-in-process”. I like that descriptor a lot. It’s an ambitious and bracingly honest remit that regards change as life’s constant companion. This is an organisation committed to the journey, not one hung up on the destination. Read more…

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You can read the first part of our conversation at the Graphic Medicine website here. We focus on how the comic graphics in zines can ‘craft contention’ about mental health: opening up different possibilities to mainstream ways of understanding mental health.

HS: Can you remember how you went about making your first zine?

MJB:  I can. It was back in 2014 or so. I was part of a network, which you’re also engaged with, of Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners who are critical of the ways in which mainstream mindfulness is often co-opted by capitalist systems and doesn’t engage with the social aspects of mental health. I wanted to explore what a more ‘social mindfulness’ might look like. 

I wrote a zine by that name in which I worked through how we might understand suffering as operating on multiple levels of experience (cultural, systemic, relational, and internal). So when we are ‘mindful’ it might involve being aware of those other ways in which suffering is exacerbated, as well as just that sense of how we exacerbate it with our own internal thought processes. The second half of the zine is open, like a workbook, encouraging people to incorporate this into their meditation – or other – practices, and make their own notes about how it works for them.

Since then my zines have become more integrated – words and pictures. This one was a bit more like a series of short blog posts, plus comic illustrations to go with each one. I hadn’t got creative with the format at that point. I was still making that move from more conventional forms of writing to zineing.

HS: Oh yes, I remember you talking about that zine at a social mindfulness event. I loved the way it illustrated the two-way dynamic between our internal and external worlds. Rather than just seeing ourselves as either internalising social norms or externalising our feelings, it’s like understanding that whilst we may be implicated in our own suffering, it’s usually through no fault of our own. These ideas can be hard to get our heads around, so it’s helpful to have a zine which distils this into something useful and meaningful to people’s everyday lives. I think the diagram really helped with that. It’s hard to show complex dynamics through text. Read more…

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