Black Lodge Press is the decade-long print project dedicated to all things anarchist, queer and anti-fascist

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.”

Since starting the imprint Cj has crafted all kinds of political emphemera, printing on t-shirts – reminiscent of his days inking up screens for band merch – as well as making standalone posters or prints. A lot of his creative output has been influenced by political banners, the visual language of activism and direct action. “I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from protest over the years, often adapting some of the slogans or words that have been written on to protest banners into the work that I make,” Cj shares. Some of the messages that eventually transfer to the page can also be a spin on song lyrics or just something “off the top of my head”, Cj says. “By far, the most popular piece of work I’ve produced, is Growing a garden is a radical and beautiful act, and I often get asked ‘who said that?’, and I don’t know what to tell people, it’s just something that came off the top of my head at the time!”

Not taking to Photoshop much, Cj uses a range of old school image making techniques to construct the collages of images and illustrations that intersect with his political messages. Using old photographs from magazines or 100 year old publications, and the odd drawing, Cj can often be found working by hand and scanning compositions with his go to typeface: Friz Quadrata (a nod to the 80s American punk band Black Flag), getting all of this print ready on “a cheap bit of software I downloaded off the internet years ago called Pixelmator”, he says.

As for print methods, the creative has been using Risograph for close to 20 years now, so “without sounding like a dick”, he disclaims, “I was quite into it before it became so cool, if you know what I mean? There was a period where people that couldn’t really afford to print stuff used Risograph machines, so I’ve always printed with Riso simply because it’s so cheap.” Aside from its accessibility, Cj has fallen in love with the technique over the years for its grainy texture and the ever-so-subtle differences it delivers in each print.

Like all of Cj’s practice, print was picked up from DIY community spaces and personal experiments: “DIY spaces are the most precious things that we have because they exist to be able to for us to produce art in a way that isn’t affected by the soul sapping power of capitalism,” he says. Much of what Black Lodge Press has been about all these years is this kind of autonomous making. “I’m not looking to convince anybody about anything with my work, it’s about celebrating a culture of resistance and joy,” CJ ends. “DIY culture is my life. It kind of always has been, and it always will be. I think if you want to do something without any form of censorship or any form of restriction, then you can just do it yourself. You don’t need to have publishers or galleries behind you or anything, you can do everything yourself.”