This week I was put into a studio group- called Tadmor. This included me, Charlie and Jessie. We were given the instruction to make a Manifesto of 2020.
We first made a list of words which summed up our 2020- the blue words are the important issues and the pink ones are the unimportant issues:
We soon came to realise that our 2020's have been similar so we wanted to focus on those words- the one that stuck out most to the three of us is Covid-19 and lockdown that started in March because of that. We then made a spider diagram in my sketchbook exploring how Lockdown had affected us and the people around us, the two which we decided to focus on was Community and Mental health.
After a lot of discussion we thought that our manifesto should be a Photomontage as we all had fun making them in our previous class. We wanted to get all our personal images which we took in lockdown and put them all together with the Coronavirus slogan in March "Stay at home, save lives, protect the NHS" in the centre of it. And then around the poster out manifesto tips and tricks!
Again, there was a lot of discussion on what the tips and tricks should be and in the end we came up with this list:
Try new things
Get involved
Stay Positive
Get out of your own head
Have a cheeky drink
Remember it's not forever
After using Photoshop to create the photomontage we decide to print off the poster A1. However, we came across an issue- the guy who prints images A1 wasn't on campus that day so we could only print A3 which wasn't too bad but it didn't quite created the effect we wanted- it didn't give off the statement we wanted too. However, there was nothing we could do about that then, this is what the result looked like:
After printing off the image we felt that there was something missing. So we began thinking about how we could photograph this manifesto in different ways. We looked back over the presentation we were given a couple days before on examples of manifestos and one stuck out to us and the idea used could be adapted to our work- we knew that this would create the big statement we were looking for!
The artist which inspired us was John Heartfield who created the manifesto "Blind and Deaf" which the newspaper over his head. (This is explained further on the inspiration page on my website). Considering one of the things our manifesto is based on is mental health we decided to relate Heartfields idea to one of tips and tricks "Get out of your own head". This topic is very important to the three of us as we all have our own experience with mental health-as does everyone which is why we really wanted to highlight it and start the conversation.
This time we adapted our first piece of work to fit the new atmosphere we were trying to achieve. The first piece is quite colour and upbeat due to all the happy memories from our images. Therefore, we decided to turn it into black and white- we also wanted to try and print it bigger. To do this we split the image in half and printed off two A3 images and stuck them together. This was the outcome of that:
The upbeat atmosphere was still clear even in black and white so we decided to crumple it when putting it over Charlie’s head to symbolise how mental health can feel.
We found a clear empty space to do the photoshoot- this again symbolises how mental health can make people feel alone- and crumpled the paper around Charlie's head. It was quite difficult to keep the paper on his head but we improvised and put his hood from his hoodie up over the paper so it kind of looks like his actual head! I started taking the images from close up first then slowly stepping back every three steps taking another image. This mimics the motions of moving out of his head- highlighting the manifesto tip! For the last image we took I had Charlie hold up the little note with the tip of there which would be out cover image. This was the final project:
We displayed the series of images in the empty space we took them in which i liked as it links the images toa space:
After taking the images the paper still held the mold of Charlie's head which I thought was really cool and could be displayed along with the images and posters:
The contrast between this crumpled mold compared to the first colourful poster is very drastic- it truly does visualise the struggles people could have faced in Lockdown due to their mental health. As being cut off from the outside can have a tough consequence on someone's mind which is why we wanted to create a manifesto to help people stay in contact with people, help them to rememberer to keep getting involved and that the issue will pass!
I am really proud of this work that we have created! I think it's very successful and portrays exactly what we wanted it too. Even though our original idea didn't work out, from that issue grew a new and stronger idea which is so far one of my most important piece of work due to the message it holds.
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