Interview :: Anna Taylor and Niall Underwood

posted by Olivia Savage September 15, 2014

You may have seen the feature we ran supporting the Kickstarter campaign for Taint Magazine a few months back, and now that issue one is hot off the press we fancied revisiting the pair behind the project, Anna and Niall, to see what they’ve learnt, and more importantly, what’s next.

1. What is Taint?
Taint is a bi-annual magazine that is broken down into three broad chapters; Art, Politics and Lifestyle. In each edition of Taint we curate our content in line with a single political issue.
As for the name, there’s a crude slang word for a woman’s perineum; the ‘taint’. It comes from the phrase ‘taint the arsehole and taint the pussy’. We wanted the magazine to serve as a middle ground between art and politics, which would inevitably be underpinned by our tongue-in-cheek sense of humour. ‘Taint an art magazine, taint a politics magazine’.

2. In an Instagram, Tumblr and predominantly internet driven time, when so many people in such a saturated market are ‘going digital’, why did you choose to print a tangible publication?
Because ‘so many people are ‘going digital’’. It is clear that we live in an age where printed media is rapidly taking a back seat and it is quite possible that in our lifetimes books and magazines may become extinct. This would be a real shame.

3. Have you two worked collaboratively on anything before?
We’re best friends, we moved to London together and shared a bedroom for two years, so we’ve mostly collaborated over household chores and ordering kebabs. Really, we wanted a project over which we could legitimately collaborate. Whilst we’ve always had a lot of influence over our respective practices, with one of us studying Fine Art and the other studying Politics, we wanted to create a forum which would incorporate both subjects equally.

4. What thought went into the print process, techniques and paper choices?
Having long admired the graphic design of a good friend of ours, we were thrilled when Josh Geoghegan wanted to be involved in the project. It was great to have someone on board who understood the print process and his creative direction and design has been a huge success, especially considering our time and budget restraints.

5. What have you learned about print Vs digital?
Although a digital publication would have been much cheaper, much easier and probably would have had a wider reach, the fact that we created a tangible publication has been unanimously well-received. Our contributors in particular have enjoyed seeing their work in print as opposed to viewing it on a screen – anyone who uses Tumblr is used to viewing their work online but we feel that the reality of print does our content justice.

6. What is the future of Taint?
This month we will be putting out a submissions call for our next issue, The Faith Issue, so keep an eye out for that! In future issues we hope to challenge ourselves and our contributors by expanding the breadth of ideological views as well as the means used to communicate these ideas. We would also like to obtain sustainable funding to enable us to continue to print Taint.

Portrait by Milo Belgrove
Images by Hikaru Funnell