Flo Low is a British-Armenian artist, graphic designer, and art educator based in Brooklyn. They use printmaking and textile to explore the figures and landscapes of the past, how they shape us and how we shape them in response to loneliness and alienation. In their practice, they gather found fragments that give us a glimpse into the layered history around us, including city typography, which they have published as the NYC ABCs, and Armenian food history, published as Recipes from a Free Artsakh. Inspired by the children they work with, their ongoing project Bags for Life plays with form and function through designing and making single-purpose (but not single use) bags.
An illustrated zine to accompany a live performance editorial designillustrationprint publication I designed and illustrated an online and print zine to accompany Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin’s live piece Gisher, a performance negotiating themes of about diaspora and memory, the way that memory lives in the body, intergenerational trauma, the struggle to feel present and safe, hypervigilence, the commodification of our stories to ensure our safety and our income, and Armenian ritual.
The design brief was to lay out Giorgia’s spoken word poetry and illustrate it. I was inspired in lay-out by Armenian illuminated manuscripts and the epic David of Sassoun, I imagined the text as a queered Armenian epic quest. I laid out English and Armenian text with my own illustration, themed around liminal spaces and night-time (a pathway into a forest, a train at night, a door opened slightly, a waning moon, curtains), I designed and laid out a zine of their text. Initially digital only (to ensure safety during Covid), it was printed in physical format in September 2020.
In September 2020, I printed 50 copies of an adapted version of the cover of “Gisher” to sell as prints, with £300 fundraised towards efforts to provide shelter, food and medicine for affected families.