The project we were given was based on terrorism and how it has become an everyday word and no one feels the fear that they might have done before. We were asked to produce 4-9 images that are using collaging methods to explore the theme of terrorism.
At the start of this project, I started by looking into different types of terrorism, some of the attacks and some of the terrorist groups as I didn’t know what path I wanted to take for my final images. Though out this project, we have done various collage workshops that show different techniques that we can use for our final images. the workshops that I throughly enjoyed were ‘a splash of paint and ink’, ‘needle and thread’, ‘warping and wefting’, ‘Joseph Ford and Stephen McMennamy’, ‘Abigail Reynolds’ and ‘Alexey Kondakov’. By exploring different artist’s and different collaging techniques from the workshops, the needle and thread workshop was the one that I took the most interest in and inspired me to use sewing in my final pieces. I liked this workshop the best as I found the sewing very therapeutic and I like the effect that it gave the images. I think by doing all of the different workshops, it will help me in the future.
My first initial idea was to use two types of sewing techniques to blur the faces of the people in the photo and then I was going to sew questions on. My idea developed to having just one word sewn on to the top and bottom and to then scratching out the faces of some of the people. When looking for inspiration from artists, Jonny Briggs was the one that stood out to me the most and when looking at his work where he scratches out the faces, it inspired me to scratch out the faces in my work.
My first idea was to sew words on to the photos about radicalisation. At first I was using my hand writing and was writing questions but I didn’t like the font and the size was all different so I then used a stencil as then all the letters were the same size but I couldn’t get them all to be in a straight line and it just looked a mess so finally I went on to Photoshop and typed the words on to the images and got the outline that way. I found that the Photoshop way was the most effective as it was quick to type them all out and it meant that the letters were the same size and that they were all inline.
For my photos, I was given the option to use my own photos that I have perviously taken or to use some that were public domain and then edit them so I wasn’t just coping their work. I chose to use my own photos as I am doing a photography course and I think that you should be able to use you own old work to make them better.
To show terrorism, I have sewn in the type of people who I think are most likely to be radicalised and the words that I decided to go with were; adventure, vulnerable, criminal and belief. I chose the colour of the thread to match up with the colour of the image because radicalisation isn’t always seen but we know it is happening, so I thought I would hide it and this is what I came up with. Another idea I had to show terrorism, was to scratch out some of the peoples faces, as you can’t see radicalisation happening around you and the people that I have chosen could be terrorist’s. Originally I was going to cross stitch over little sections of the photos and was going to match up the background colour with the thread and blur out the faces that way, but I decided the scratching effect shows the true meaning of a terrorist. The sewing would be neat and ‘perfect’ where as scratching the faces off makes the photos look messy.
Overall, I like that there is a messy element and a neat element. I also like that I have done the thread so that it blends into the image as I found that if I had a colour that stood out, it would be too much and might take away from the image. If I was to do this again, I would try to see what the cross stitch would look like alongside the words and I would maybe try to do bigger patches of the scratching out as I felt like some patches are not seen very well as they are very small.
Milly Forder 