2 things:
we have a live brief with oxfam that will be part of an art trail throughout norwich. they’ve given us a bunch of unsellable things from the shop, mostly scratched vinyl and really old sheet music, and we’ve each got to use them to create a piece for their shop window display. i kind of have some ideas that i ran past my tutor and a TA which might be cool? i need a cheap but fancy picture frame/mirror though....i saw one for a tenner in the church antique shop so i might go back and get that idk. more details later! it will be related to the next point!
our module this term has been “collections” and so for the final project we have to expand on our personal collection that we’ve been using over the past month and develop it through a cohesive theme. i’m exploring the colour pink and how it corresponds to girls, particularly within a teenage setting. there’s a lot of interesting and wonderful work already that tackles pink as a gendered colour enforced on women and used to box us in by consumerist society, but i feel like we unintentionally place blame or guilt on young girls for responding to this? we encourage boys and men to rethink pink, but we never make them feel like they have to renounce blue or feel ashamed to associate with that colour, as if it negates their political views. i want to create a series of pieces that unashamedly praise teenage girls and represent them and their interests in a pink setting. i’m really uncomfortable with the amount of feminist-created work that uses female childhood and themes closely associated with young girls to display female sexuality - i think there’s a place for expressing female sexuality and i adore it, but it shouldn’t automatically use images that contribute to society’s hypersexualisation of adolescent girls doing non-sexual things. i want this project to use pink as an expression of softness, delicacy, sensitivity, and fun. i want it to be reflective of girls enjoying themselves without the narrative of it pandering to patriarchy. i’d like to show that pink is a colour, genderless, and while we associate it with femininity, that’s not its limit. it can be used to offset the reality of girlhood - the bad, the unstable, and the sad - as a therapeutic wash, or even just a coping mechanism. just as blue can represent an intense set of emotions and atmosphere (sadness; depression; loneliness), i want to do the same with pink, and show it as a state of being.
NB for pink project - irl i’d love for this concept to be realised fully regardless of gender, and for it to include girls, boys, and non-binary people! i DREAM of that! but for now i’m limiting it to girls as it works better with where my collection and research has already taken me, and in terms of carrying the project out, it’s a lot more feasible considering what i have to work with lol. maybe one day....but the Pink Lyf is not limited to girls, it surpasses gender altogether, although i would like to place more attention on the female (cis and trans) and nonbinary aspects to begin with. i love that i’m talking about this like it’s going somewhere real lmao i dream too big......but this post will make my critical review of my project much easier ;-)
