speech
2019
8.5”x5.5”
digital illustrations

Published: October 7, 2024

SS: Hello &z., so nice to connect with you just after your birthday! Thank you for joining us and sharing more of your story. You are a member of The Neighbors and have some of your work posted on our page along with your artist statement and biography for those who want to learn more!  


So, you’re an illustrator and writer. We both went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which is where we met. How has your practice changed since being in school? You have moved halfway across the earth since leaving SAIC, how has this geographical shift changed your practice?



&z.: hey Sophia! that is a very good question, aha. i left Chicago because i was just not doing well emotionally and physically after graduating. things weren’t going the way i intended. i had to rethink all my original plans because of how the world shifted from beneath all of us and it just got to be too much. i was at my sensory limit, so really moving across the earth has affected my practice in the sense that i’m slowly finding my way back to myself and it’s hard. it’s really hard trying to shake off all the unhelpful things i learned during art school that affect my practice. i’m stuck in a cycle of perfection and meaning that i’m struggling to claw my way out of. i want to just make stuff like i used to, but it feels like there’s a barrier to entry now. which makes me sad.


it’s changed by becoming borderline non-existent. to be fair though, i never really had a consistent practice in the first place. i made work when i had to for assignments or when i felt the distinct urge to put something down on paper — an urge i felt less of as i progressed through college. i leaned towards making work about what i was feeling in the moment when i was truly lost for ideas. it always helped me to be introspective and really sort through my feelings and dissect what it means to feel that way and what caused it and it always ended up being my favourite work despite it being an outpouring of myself, a shedding of my soul in a way. it made it a little harder to take critique even though i always did because i needed it but i would always be hyper anxious about the flaws in my work and training myself not to take anything negative personal, since my work itself is usually so personal. i almost wish i could make more work disconnected from myself, but i’ve found it so difficult to do.



SS: What are you currently working on? What inspires you to create these days? Do you find yourself writing or illustrating more? Or is it always a combination of both like you say in your artist statement: “their visual work and writing go hand in hand and are often merged into a hybrid to create rich and layered artworks.”

honeymilk
2021
8.5”x5.5”
digital illustrations

&z.: i’ve been working (very slowly) working on a queer romance novel for several years now called “honeymilk”, it’s about two childhood best friends who have been in love with each other forever but they’re both in denial and thus have remained friends. then one of them gets a partner and now they have to figure out what to do. i have so many ideas for this book and it’s become so precious that i’ve stopped myself from working on it. i’m actually trying to write something else, just to prove to myself that i can do it, but that’s taking a while too, since i want the characters to flesh themselves out organically in my head, like with the others.


recently i have done two book related projects, the first was a book cover for a friend i met at my job who was a probation officer. his pseudonym is John Ebrington and the book is called “You, the Sentencer” and irks an interactive book with real cases that he took and is basically asking the reader to decide the outcomes. he’s super passionate about the legal system and how things are being handled with crime and how unreasonable the justice system is, so that’s the main basis for his wanting to write the book. to kind of show people that the law isn’t fair and that your average person can get in trouble over so,etching you didn’t even realise was a problem. which is connected to what i did for the cover, it depicts and elderly Black woman sitting looking worried in the waiting from at the Probation Office. and it’s inspired by a real case John told me about and was all over the news because of how bad it was, there was a mishap with payment for people that work at the Post Office and a bunch of employees were paid way more than they were supposed to. however, even though it wasn’t their fault, the people that got the money and weren’t able to pay it back were prosecuted. the issue was, they didn’t give them enough time to pay it back to and it was such a large sum of money, that realistically a lot of those people needed. so a bunch of otherwise innocent people now have criminal records over something that was out of their control. completely ridiculous. either way, with the cover, i made her look very melancholy, i chose blue as the main colour scheme because i thought it would add to that and then i made the wallpaper floral because John told me that before all this she’d been wanting to be a florist and i thought it would be sweet to emphasise that.


the second book project i did, was designing a booklet for my best friend Raven Smith’s art show Escapade:“A Spectrum of Distractions” and i had so much fun putting it together with her and getting to really put my all into making it really good for her show. she commissioned a few writers (me included) to write poems and short stories based on the pieces in the show and the book was an anthology all of them with all the corresponding artworks. i have two pieces of writing in there, one is a poem called “aaaaaaanxietiii”, (the artwork, “Anxiety” also features me)and is written in experimental poetic prose, where i play a lot with spacing to emphasise emotion and to bring the reader into my head as much as possible. it’s a pretty sad poem, i wrote it when i was arguably at my lowest, but it’s very raw and vulnerable. the other piece was a short story called “des perle dans le vents” - “Pearls in the Wind” which is also the name of the piece. it’s a diptych set in the 1920s and features two women sitting in a club and the second one is two different women laying in bed having a girls night in. i worked on the story with Raven and we came up with a semi-comedic semi-serious story about a girl who was wronged by a man and her getting revenge on him in an elaborate way.


i’m very proud of the work i did for both these projects and i’m working on getting photos together for my website, so i’ll have to let you know when i put them up.


SS: Please tell us about your comics. Describe how your work differs from the norm. Can you provide and explain in examples we can share?

BLACK GIRL MAGIC 2: THE REDUX
2021
8.5”x11”
blue ballpoint pen and masking tape on gridded notebook paper and newly drawn digital
illustrations and doodles

&z.: my comics differ from the norm because i feel restrained by the way comics are traditionally made. i wanted to think outside the boxes, quite literally. and my comics professor Beth Hetland (she’s the best) was super open and helpful about letting me explore that and go with the flow when it came to my work which was very freeing. i’m really into typography and lettering and have been since i was super young, i was so obsessed with what i would call “bubble letters” that i stayed up drawing them for hours and was super tired at school the next day because i was so excited about it. so, i used my love for type and my knowledge of composition to challenge myself to create a narrative without borders and still have it make sense. it felt like a puzzle, working out how much i could put in and still have the story flow and be understandable. it was the perfect challenge for me and i really enjoyed “breaking the rules”. the comics i’ve made that best represent this is “DL”, the title was longer but i’ve had to censor it for job opportunities, although i will probably take it out of my portfolio eventually when i’m able to improve upon it and make something more polished. but it’s a comic about the migraines i used to get everyday, how they affected my life and what i did to cope with them. i chose a limited colour palette, just a light yellow and really pushed for something new to draw the eyes into every page. there’s a lot i would change about it now though. the other one is the comic version of “honeymilk”, it’s meant to be a fun episodic version of their story. them in little vignettes of moments being cute or doing something fun together. it’s also a work in progress, i made it during my last semester at SAIC and i was really struggling to make work by that point so it’s not fully completed, but i do intend to revisit it.


SS: In your artist statement you talk about finding the magnificent in the mundane by saying, “life is so rich and full, that even the smallest things, like a ladybird crawling on a window screen, is worth writing about.” Please tell us about those small moments that seem to move you the most. What aspects of your life make it into your work on a frequent basis?



&z.: the small moments that seem to move me the most, i guess are just the types of things that people take for granted.


SS: Where can we find your work? Have you been published anywhere you’d like to share? How can we, The Neighbors community, support you in your practice?


&z.: you can find my work on my website and on my instagram @ampersan.dot. i’ve been working on getting my work published, i do have some work here and there in smaller publications that you can find on my CV on my site, but there aren’t any that i want to share specifically. i really want to work on creating new work that isn’t associated with my college work. i don’t have any ideas for how you can support me at the moment, i’m just trying to form a more consistent practice, but when i think of something i will definitely reach out. i struggle with making concrete schedules and sticking to them, so it would probably be something in that vein.


SS: Are you still looking for work in the field? What positions excite you the most? What would your dream job be? Who would your ideal employer be or do you have dreams of being self-employed?


&z.: i am! i have a variety of ideas for my ideal position, i’m mostly going where the wind takes me but i would prefer to work with books. i would love to focus on queer romance book covers or something relating to book formatting.

devil’s lettuce
2020
5.5”x8.5”
digital illustration

SS: To wrap up, where in this world is your ideal home? Where do you imagine yourself settling? And do you have any last sentiments you would like to share with our audience before we finish?


&z.: i’m not actually sure to be honest. i’ve always been a floater. i like to say that i belong to the ether because i’m always between places and i never quite feel settled anywhere.

&z. (zeinab “ames” ajasa) (they/she) grew up in suburban Illinois, just outside Chicago. they were eight years old when they moved to the UK. their multi-cultural upbringing helps her reach a feeling of belonging despite not having a concrete place to call home. they moved back to the US for university and graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Studio, focused on Illustration and Writing. they currently reside in the UK post graduation, looking for work in their field.

@heartbeat.bouquet