For my personal investigation I will be focusing on people and things effected by World War II, with this I have come up with 2 ideas;

The first – My work is situated on a farm, which has been in Jersey since pre WWII, due to the Germans restricting farm usage during this time, it would have had an influence on the farm. Due to having easy access and a relationship with the owner of the farm and the farm being within the family, I believe it would be easy to gain information about what happened during that time, and acquire photos and maybe some photos during that time.

The second – My grandfather was born in Punjab, India, and was 8 years old during this time of WWII, India was affected during WWII. He is fascinated in genealogy which is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. He has worked with my other grandfather to help retrace the other half of my family. He has retraced his side of the family back generations with immaculate detail. With his passion for genealogy and experience of being a young child during World War 2 I feel that this would be able to bring me much more detail to the story and how it affected him, but also it would bring a personal aspect into it with it being my grandfather but him recollecting his memories from that time.

Another idea and personal aspect to this is on the other side of my family who also had involvement with the world war. My granddad on my dads side was involved in world war 2 and put my grandfather up for adoption with the thought that he wasn’t making it back home after, and the family who then adopted my granddad were an Armenian family, which the father was a survivor from world war 1. My grandmothers father (My great grandfather) was a firefighter during the Blitz, which was Nazi Germany’s sustained aerial bombing campaign against Britain in WWII.

I have to hone in on one section, which I think due to accessibility and being personal will be my granddad who was born in Punjab.

From my mind map I wanted to explore further in depth the idea of investigating Occupation Vs Liberation, to see where it could take me and enable me to represent and portray something personal and something that I would be able to develop and grow ideas off. However I decided to branch away from the idea of Occupation as it would limit me in aspect of having to concentrate on the Jersey island itself, as well as this factor the Occupation of Jersey is already an area that I have deeply explored and investigated in previous work. Therefore, I wanted to take this opportunity to try something different and possibly an area that i had a great passion for which would allow me to satisfy my fascination for the topic itself.

From this first mind map and mood board, it has allowed me to begin to grasp my initial ideas and have a concept of where I want to go with the project in the future linking to the final outcomes. For this project I have decided to look closer to my dance background and placing it with the idea of feeling liberated through dancing and further connotation that may come along with this aspect. This is a topic that hugely interests me as it is a huge part of my life and a big commitment. As well as dancing myself since a young age, I have an even bigger love of watching it and seeing the development and movement of individual dancers, following there careers, to me this adds inspiration and motivations. For this project I have decided to project my enthusiasm and liberation of dance through other dancers history, background, love and other factors that I might find along the way. Furthermore, I will use archival photos from each individuals dance albums and that shows images from when they were younger to help project the journey they have gone through to where they are now in their dancing history. Finally, I will discover the deeper meaning and feeling that presents dancers on a daily and the concept of what dance means to them, this will allow me to look closely at the conceptual and contextual aspects of the individual and the liberation of dance.

This mind map shows in a very general view, of how fashion and clothing affects our lives and essentially creates loops of high and low confidence and status, which feed themselves and are difficult to get out of. It also touches on social media and how it promotes potentially unnecessary clothes buying habits, and an artificial need to have nicer clothes to get more likes and attention.

How has Darren Harvey-Regan explored modernism and abstraction in ‘The Erratics’?

Can abstraction of landscapes be used to tell the story of forced laborers in WWII?

How does the work of Darren Harvey-Regan explore abstraction as an intention and process?