Jordan is from Portlaoise. He grew up with a keen interest in music, which evolved into a love for clubbing and photography. He studied the latter in Dublin, and after graduating, decided to move to London in 2022. Jack moved around the same time, after they finished their degree in printmaking at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD).
“Everyone just started emigrating at the exact same time, because a lot of the spaces were closing. I think after Covid, everyone was just fed up and kind of wanted a change,” Jordan said.
Although Jack admitted to now being more of a “retired party girl”, the pair met through nightlife, which is embedded in much of the work they do. It’s no surprise, then, that it was somewhat of a catalyst for starting SMUT.
“During the first summer of Covid, Jordan and I pulled together our archive of nightlife images that we had taken over the previous two or three years, and we made a very small staple-bound zine,” Jack explained. “We did a really small edition, sold it online, and it was meant to be an homage, a celebration of nightlife, which obviously wasn’t happening during Covid at that time. And the zine did quite well; it sold out very quickly.”
Due to its success, they made a follow-up edition, which was expanded and had a slightly bigger print run. They also got it in with a few stockists.
“I think that was the first idea around doing something in DIY publishing. But at that stage, it was not under SMUT; it was just its own individual project,” Jack continued.
It wouldn’t become SMUT until February 2022. Jordan had been in Paris the November before, during Paris Photo – the world’s largest fair for photography and image-based art.
“I went to this exhibition that was on that weekend, but not part of the official fair,” Jordan began. “There was one room of students and very small publishers, and there was another room of more established publishers. When I saw all the students’ work – they’re making work for them and their friends and publishing their own work themselves, kind of similar to what we had done together – I really liked the attitude and the energy of a lot of the work,” he remembered.
“I really liked what they were about and how they were expressing themselves in that way, and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, we don’t really have anything like this in Ireland. We have friends that make zines and that kind of thing, but no one is running their own collective’, and a lot of those students were. So I texted Jack at the time, like, ‘We should do something like this together’, and then Jack came up with the name ‘SMUT’. We launched two months later… We launched it on Thursday, February 22, and I moved to London on the 24th. So we did the launch, and the next day I sold my car, and then the next day I flew here.”
Since then, SMUT has enjoyed huge success. They have released 10 print publications, and in 2024, the project expanded beyond the primary domain of publishing to include events. They have regularly attended and exhibited at fairs like Athens Art Book Fair, SPRINT Milano, Dublin Art Book Fair, Paris Ass Book Fair, Bristol’s Books on Photography and Manchester’s Bound Art Book Fair, amongst others. Their work has been profiled by i-D, DJ Mag, The Face, Polyesterzine, BUTT, HERO and The Irish Times, and in December 2025, the project was included on the Dazed 100 list of global cultural changemakers.
Speaking about their ethos, Jack said, “The remit of the press is explicitly that we platform queer artists, and we’re assisting them in the production of printed matter… It’s kind of a play on the name, because obviously ‘smut’ has this relation to things that are obscene, but I think we want to try and maybe consider those ideas around what has value, what is acceptable. We’re interested, I think, primarily in work that maybe would struggle in a more mainstream capacity to get the exposure and visibility.”
In terms of whom they collaborate with, it is often their friends, or people who have become friends through their work. “It’s the same for the parties as well,” Jordan added. “A lot of the DJs that we have at the parties and the artists we commission to do installations are also friends.”
The press released its latest publication at the end of May, called Cruising Archaeology II: Eurotrash. It is the highly anticipated follow-up to their original Cruising Archaeology from 2024, which quickly became a cult favourite.
This particular project was initially born as an Instagram account of the same name, where scans of discarded material from over half a dozen cruising locations around London were documented as cultural artefacts. The unique relics have been used to uncover and investigate the types of sex and pleasure that happen in these areas, while also spotlighting the often invisible sexual practice.
“The project started because I was visiting this area that’s not that far from where I live – I was actually there earlier this afternoon – and it’s a real cruising area, but it’s also a very social, hangout area,” Jack explained. They added that this spot is different from what people might traditionally imagine when they think of cruising, which can be “quick, transactional, always fleeting… People really like hanging out there, and it’s a really nice area,” they elaborated.
“I was just spending a lot of time there, and I began to pick up the condom wrappers, or the things I found, because some of them were really interesting. I started scanning them on a flatbed scanner, and I was just building this archive on my laptop. Then I literally had this brainwave out of nowhere that the project would be called Cruising Archaeology; it just came to me, and I made an Instagram account. I kept it anonymous and started uploading the scans with the name of what it was, the description and where I found it.”
As Jack continued this work, they decided to expand it to cover more cruising locations around London. When SMUT was invited to attend the Paris Ass Book Fair in June 2024, they decided to make a publication specifically for it, and that’s when the print edition of Cruising Archaeology came to be.
Now, two years later, they have released the follow-up. The new book builds on the original’s success by expanding the breadth of archaeological sites to various locations around Europe, including Berlin, Athens, Dublin, Barcelona and Paris. The cruising locations span woodland areas, public toilets, palatial gardens, sex clubs and beaches, speaking to the inventive ways people seek pleasure within the folds of city infrastructure and natural landscape.
Like its predecessor, vivid scans exist alongside writing that contextualises, complicates and historicises cruising’s material traces. This edition features interviews with Marc Svensson of You Are Loved, a London-based harm reduction initiative, and Mati Klitgård of Gay Consent.Lab in Berlin. Both offer urgent perspectives on chemsex, intimacy, and consent in contemporary queer life. Other contributors include Stav B, who addresses the persistent erasure of lesbian cruising spaces; Jordan Tannahill, who recounts a wild night in Hampstead Heath; Prem Sahib, whose insert responds to the complicated relationship between the digital and the physical; and João Florêncio, who wrote the opening piece for the publication, interlacing queerness with empire, hauntology and decay.
“The danger a lot of the time with books around cruising is that they can often replicate certain narratives, and only certain voices get heard around this topic. It is very dominated by cis white gay men,” Jack replied when asked about the importance of including diverse perspectives in the publication. They pointed out that things like gender are not often interrogated in these spaces, and it was important for them to bring new angles to the conversation.
The book has launched at a number of events across several European cities, including at The Boilerhouse in Dublin, before an afterparty in Yamamori Tengu. By hosting some of these events in sex clubs and saunas, the pair hope to “reframe these spaces as sites of cultural relevance, and as sites of knowledge production, as well as community spaces. They are often overlooked, denigrated or seen as spaces of low value for culture, but they’re actually incredibly valuable community spaces,” Jack said.
“There aren’t many spaces that are like that… In terms of, for example, intergenerational interactions and also coming into contact with people that you might not anticipate. And I think that’s one of the biggest aspects that digital cruising through apps is not able to replicate.” People approach apps with ideas of what they think they desire, and who they are and who they are looking for, but cruising in physical spaces disrupts that, “because you end up figuring out that maybe you like something that you didn’t know that you were going to like, and in that way, maybe it reveals something about yourself,” Jack said, adding, “A lot of people really depend on these spaces.”
As well as the book release and launch events, there is also an accompanying exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London until July 5, marking the first time Cruising Archaeology has been presented in a gallery setting. It is clearly an exciting time for the press, which continues to go from strength to strength as it carves its own path through the world of independent publishing and event organising. As collaborators, Jordan and Jack’s story serves as an example of what’s possible when you allow friendships and creative passions to intertwine to build something fruitful for communities that are often hungry for more.
To find out more about SMUT Press and Cruising Archaeology II: Eurotrash, visit smutpress.online.