Visual Stimulation is a lean, mean zine from Hattie Stewart that puts sensuality over sexuality

In Visual Stimulation, a punky zine from the London-based illustrator and artist Hattie Stewart, sensuality beats out sexuality. Like most of her personal endeavours, it began with Hattie “goofing around in the studio”, developing a new collage work that was found in the excess and left over clippings of her previous work. Here in these bits and bobs of vintage ads, muscle mags, strange graphics and half-forgotten headlines, Hattie found that themes were beginning to materialise in the curatorial process – what was a dumping ground for sketches of ideas became a blast of hyperactive imagery centred around a dopamine-thirsty visual culture.

The zine is concerned with the colour palettes of feelings: love, desire, joy, power, anger – that’s why Visual Stimulation is filled with sweaty muscles, ripples of lightning strikes, licking lips and flames. “Sometimes when scrolling through the archive folder I’d spot two unrelated words nestled together that became the beginnings of a sentence and so I’d build a spread from there, a sort of pattern recognition,” says Hattie. Words like brutal, pleasure, perfect, dangerous, rage, instant relief. “I was trying to make sense of an excess amount of information in order to find personal meaning. I also liked the idea of a word repeated, the hammer to the head of it all, something I’d explored in my own type work previously.”

For those who are in desperate need of stimulation, this zine delivers – its visual language is razor-sharp and packed with colour, each page feels like a porno magazine that has vomited everywhere. Hattie calls it a “frenetic deluge”, a collection of themes that circle the drain of “online fatigue”, a way to process an excessive amount of information in order to create meaning and seek comfort. “Originally the book was going to be called Visual Debris, which accounted for the initial chaos and lack of structure, but as some of the more “motivational” themes and spreads started to appear I felt Visual Stimulation was a more fitting title, as it grew more intentional,” says Hattie. The zine doubles as a tour through the graphic design history of stimulating media, with cut-outs that entice, seduce, eroticise. When stacked all together on the page, it’s difficult not to see how predatory the sultry messaging and clamouring for attention is, often playing on the reader’s insecurities – Hattie does very well in communicating the insidiousness of marketing and selling pleasure.

Back when physical media “wasn’t so scarce”, Hattie would cut and paste a lot more liberally, but now printed media is precious – Visual Stimulation requires a lot more than Hattie would ever be willing to destroy. Printing with Risograph meant Hattie could maintain the imperfect quality of something handmade and due to her dislike of digital work in her own practice, she wanted to make sure that the textural qualities of the work was a little bit out of her control. In a way, collage is a destructive process, something you can’t get too attached to, a type of killing of context and rebirth through remixing. Here, Hattie shows how the preciousness of images are trampled by the need for short bursts of dopamine – the elements that came from books that would have been read forever are now cut up and ruined, becoming a commentary on what we do with art in order to get what we need for brief happiness.

“Sensuality over sexuality was a theme that developed naturally over the course of the book’s creation. In a current age of excess porn, intense headlines and shallow desires, I just wanted to create a little something that leaned into a deeper yearning, reclamation of power and curiosity,” says Hattie, as she prepares for a second volume of Visual Stimulation. “Pleasure is important, but a pleasure that can last a lifetime is best, in my humble opinion.”