A celebration of DIY culture and autonomous making, this press’ political ephemera is gloriously analogue and anti-capitalist.
By Ellis Tree
When you grow up in West Cumbria, where “there’s more sheep than there are human beings”, and you’re into art, punk and anarchy, you have to quite actively create a different kind of cultural scene to countryside monotony. This is the perspective of Cj, the artist behind Black Lodge Press. Having “always lived out in the sticks”, as he puts it, this kind of quiet has now had, upon reflection, quite a large influence on his work.
It all began with an obsession with punk music that started as far back as primary school, and later grew into a love for print and zines. Over time, Cj became connected to the various political movements that exist within punk and DIY scenes: “Where I was living in West Cumbria, you kind of had to do it yourself. So it meant that I was creating my own zines and self publishing things from a really young age.”
It makes sense that Cj eventually ended up coining Black Lodge Press: an independent print project that’s been running for over a decade, dedicated to all things anarchist, queer and anti-fascist. When the press began all those years ago, Cj started out with the simple idea to share and distribute his own zines and comics alongside those of close friends. Working at a comic shop in Newcastle at the time, he already had a place to platform his early copies. “The whole project feels like that scene from the film Withnail and I , where they’ve gone on holiday by mistake” he says. “I always kind of feel like I became an artist by mistake, I didn’t train to become one and I didn’t study art after school – It just kind of happened.”
