In the field of mental health and wellbeing, art making is more well known as a therapeutic practice, where it is conceptualised as an aesthetic tool for exploring indefinable and unspoken experiences. Recently, art making methods have emerged as inclusive and participatory approaches in mental health research. Methods such as drawing, poetry inquiry, collage, photography have been shown to be useful in research concerning sensitive topics such as anxiety, allowing participants to express their thoughts, opinions and experiences on difficult issues, while remaining relatively distant from those issues. In this paper we discuss an arts-based research project utilizing zine-making as a method to explore young women’s lived experiences of anxiety. A zine is a handmade (DIY), small circulation, and self-published and distributed, magazine, first emerging within science fiction(1930s), punk (1970s) and feminist (1990s) cultural mo(ve)ments. Drawing on feminist new materialist theory, which understands knowledge-creation through research as an event enabling new understandings and experience to emerge, we consider how the participatory processes offered by zine-making afforded opportunities to explore new/different knowledge of anxiety. Importantly, we discuss the way in which the young women created their own collaborative methodology for transforming anxiety beyond its preconceived limits. These are vital considerations in mental health research where we are interested in how new knowledge can alleviate human suffering. As we will discuss, with/in the aesthetic, materialist-discursive encounters of art making, the young women were able to disrupt the reductive gendered identities assigned to them as ‘anxious persons’ and affirm alternate practices of being together and living well in the world.