Mark Pawson
Mark Pawson was a zinester, artist, badgemaker, bookseller and fan of mail art. He was born in 1964 and died in 2025. He grew up in Lymm, Cheshire, UK, moving to London to study sociology (where his thesis was on mail art) at City University of London. He became very active in the Mail Art Network. He lived in east London in his adult life.
His work is often refered to as artists books (by artists) but he used books and zines to describe them. His distro or creative output often under the banner Disinfotainment, but usually just under his name. But sometimes as part of other groups such as the Aggressive School of Cultural Workers.
In 1994 he co-curated the exhibition 'Counter Intelligence' of self published zines, comics, pamphlets and flyers at the 121 Centre squat in Brixton, it later tracelled to Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. Between 1998 and 2012 he wrote zine review column for Variant, which can be found online archived at their website.
He makes a cameo in Iain Sinclair's 2010 book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, talking to him about Hackney's mole man and offering him a 'homes for all' homemade badge.
In 2012, his personal archive of zines and art (collected over 30 years) was displayed at UNBOXING exhibition at xero, kline & coma, London. At the time of the exhibition Pawson hoped his collection one day would be institutionally catalogued and kept in an archive.
He has tabled at the London Zine Symposium, PageMasters Zine Fair, DUPLICATE fair (Birmingham, UK), Small Publishers Fair and Brewzine
Work
In terms of mail art he collected rubber stamps, having over 250. He was also known to wallpaper his walls with his correspondence.
His zine (or is it a book?) 'Die-Cut Plug Wiring Diagram Book' has been deemed a canon artists book and has its own Wikipedia page.
In the late 90s he would distro the zine Bizzarrism from Australia and was always a fan of Craphound and would tend to have copies in his distro.
His zines and books are at Tate Britain library, MOMA Library in New York, Cardiff Metropolitan University art special collections and even in the hands of Bjork.
External Links
- Mark Pawson's website as it was on 6 December, 2024, via the Wayback Machine.
- Die-Cut Plug Wiring Diagram Book on Wikipedia.
