6/26/2022
Acrylic, Yarn, Twine, Fabric, Magazine cutouts
The Compassion Poster was centered on bringing attention to an area that deserves compassion in the opinion of the student. The goals, as related to this class, were to use the elements of composition that we have learned to “create and communicate” a visual message that can be received and interpreted successfully by our target audience, to incite compassion for the subject area intended, using as few words as possible.
With guidance we started with some divergent thinking; I naturally gravitated to a family-oriented subject, parental stress.
This was followed by more divergent thinking to delve deeper into the idea, and I realized that familial patterns observed in our past serve as the background for a majority of our interactions with our kids. The 20th century all over the world was ridden with socio-political, socio-economic upheaval, which often lead to parenting under incredibly stressful circumstances playing out in the background for our prior generations, and I wondered how many of those parenting patterns (directly or indirectly) were carrying forth to the current generation. Thus I settled on compassionate parenting, in the context of breaking past familial cycles in order to parent more compassionately and give rise to a happier, kinder and healthier generation in terms of mental health.
I interviewed an author I follow, who wrote “Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent”, and she was the perfect resource, as parent plus subject matter expert.
This was my first time using thumbnails in my approach to coming up with a design and it was crucial. (This is a skill very compatible with how my brain works, and also something I naturally do without realizing it.)
I love old trees and their symbolism, so I went with the loose interpretation of the family tree concept in one of my posters. The roots, trunk and growth parallels to real life helped me convey my message successfully. For my second poster, I was inspired by an image of a yarnball. I decided to use actual yarn to indicate the child parent channel of compassion. A photo of caged tropical birds was powerful for me, b/c I grew up in India and I saw these in people’s homes all the time.
The messaging was challenging: how to make an image strong enough to need little wording. Some of the works shared by the professor in class were genius in delivering a message with minimal wording. I had to constantly strive to think outside the box, and from the perspective of the audience.
I believe all art has intrinsic layers and can reflect the particular place the artist is in at the time. However, this is the first time I created work that involved research, a deep level understanding and connecting with subject matter experts. Creating art for a greater purpose is a powerful feeling, because it is hard to visualize oneself making a big difference, but creating on this scale in a classroom helps me experience the achievability. Professor Lisa pushing us to use meaningful material in our collage, and always encouraging us to change the context of our material, as well as consider positive and negative space were key to get us to “think outside the box”.
