Social Action Evaluation

Social Action Evaluation

When I started the Social Action Project I wasn't sure what issue I wanted to try and tackle as I was interested in exploring multiple problem areas in today's society. After researching a few areas such as nuclear warfare and bullying I decided to create my project work around racism. I'm passionate about this subject as I'm lucky enough to live in a place where I am in the majority, I don't know what it's like to be looked down upon and treated with disrespect wholly because of my race and what I look like. Sadly though, many people are being discriminated against and shunned purely for something that is out of their control, something that is only on the surface, a different pigmentation in the skin and yet we are all the same, human. Through this project my aim is to give those discriminated against a chance to be heard and those of us choosing to ignore it, a chance to open our eyes and see that we are all equal.

Overall I wanted to achieve a piece with multiple messages, different art works on the same sized space connected by one running theme, racism. The way I did this was by choosing to make a textile box, size squares of fabric with different ways of showing equality that will be joined together to make a cube. The various fabrics I chose were all in a monochrome scale with a couple of exceptions, I chose monochrome because black and white have always had a big divide, so I thought by mixing the two and using different shades of grays and black and white stripes it would portray a joining of races. I did a few pages of experiments in my art book which determined the art I would put on it, one showing two humans almost in an equals sign, another saying "Racism is Real". These statements and art pieces were really important to me in order to get my message across.

Using fabrics and needles work was a big step for me, I've never done anything like that before but I thoroughly enjoyed it, I practiced a variety of techniques in order to have the sewing the way I wanted it and I ended up finding it vert therapeutic, I still need to spend a lot more time practicing in order to improve but I would happily challenge myself to do it again perhaps for my Final Major Project.

My inspiration for this piece comes from my image research. All the images I researched were from either the South African Apartheid or the Holocaust which happened fairly recently in history terms but in technology it didn't so all the images were in black and white which influenced my decision to base my final piece on a monochrome pallet. All of my research images are very raw and saddening to look at because they're reality. It's difficult to re-create that reality into a textured art piece which is why I took the decision to make my final piece more informative. The aim of this is to try and open peoples eyes to the reality of what inspired me.  

 A problem I faced in this project was time management. I didn't get to finish my final piece which doesn't actually disappoint me too much, I wanted to spend time on this project as it's something I'm very passionate about and to rush it wouldn't have felt natural to me. If I had tried needle work in the past then maybe I would've known how much longer it would take so a goal for my next project is to plan forward more and give myself more time to finish things that are important to me as an artist.

 Megan Chilcott.