Responsive: International KYM Competition

When it came to choosing briefs for the Responsive Individual Practice I struggled to find, not good briefs, but briefs I felt i could successfully take on and that were more tailored top me and the way I like to work. I really liked working on LoopDeLoop because there wasn't too much challenge there for me, the only thing I needed to keep in mind then was making sure it fit the theme of 'Sisters' and looped. The KYM competition was far more of a challenge in terms of how to tackle a brief. The competition was set up to combat the issues that are going on in the world today, being the refugee crisis. Each participant could submit up to three works and any technique could be used to create the 'caricatures'. I felt like this was a very interesting brief to take on and I thank Malachi for bringing it to my attention. But I knew it was going to be a brief I was going to need to put a lot of thought into to ensure I create a work that is sympathetic and takes the issues seriously.

I knew my weaknesses going into this brief. Firstly I feel like I am aware of the issues surrounding the refugee crisis going on in the world, but I am in know way an expert or have experienced any of their suffering myself so I felt like I did not have the right to create anything with any great meaning behind it or beat anyone over the head with a how they should feel sort of message.

I could have attempted to create a political cartoon about the issue, but again I am no expert on the subject so felt like I could't really do this. How I went about this brief was by finding images of refugees that are already powerful and provocative and create work from these. I did not necessarily see this as 'cheating' because I felt that it was instead working from what I see and since these events are not necessarily taking place nearby to me, I was only really going to be able to conduct research by finding imagery from the internet. 

Once I had found the images I wanted to work from I drew my own drawings of each of the images with a fine liner pen, scanned them in and edited them on Photoshop.

It was when I edited the images on Photoshop that I could really be creative because up until this point there was nothing unique about what I had done at all. I had imagined from the start that I would use a glowing technique on each image but I did not think it would turn out as successfully as it did. I realised that with each of these images that the less is more approach could be applied effectively to this project.

I really enjoyed working on this brief even if the subject is very serious and troubling but I felt like I came out of it having created work that was not over-the-top with sentiment and did not try to beat anyone over the head with a 'message' or feeling a certain way but I still do hope that when people view the images they do think about the many issues going on in the world today about refugees and at least feel something.