What I learnt from Personal Investigation

The first part of the ‘Personal Investigation’ we focused around Art and Activism. A majority of the study I did was centred around the Black Lives Matter movement and the Pandemic. I heavily explored restriction and repression which both events had a heavy influence in, the Black lives matter topic being centred towards abolshing the african amercian repression in the US, and the pandemic topic showing the impact of new restrictions and, essentially the new way of life we have all experinced this year. I finalised this series of work by exploring the question of ‘What makes an image iconic’, answering with my own attempt at creating an iconic image with the phrase ‘The New Normal’ in mind. The image I captured portarys a person standing in the centre of a busy street wearing a mask as everyone else walks on by.

Interpreting Love

On the topic of love, I produced a zine (a 16 page booklet) about my father, giving a brief insight into his life, both from the perspective of the last and the present, allowing for a comparison over the years whereby I took photos of archival imagery, (old photos of him as a toddler from the family album) and also taking photos of him in the present day, as well as objects (books/stamps etc) and places (houses where he grew up) all that have great significance to his personal story which is completely unique to him. The final product had an abstract feel as one the most important points I considered when producing the zine. This concluded to be quite effective as different people interpret the zine in different ways without an obvious and clear cut story line, A theme throughout was the idea that everyones relationship is different and that is what makes them special asking the question about what truly is love and what makes a relationship so unique.

Interpreting Rebellion

For the rebellion portion of the first part of the ‘Personal Study’ I focused the project around the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic on teenagers, presenting the final project as a film. With the main focus on ‘Rebellion’ I took a stance representative of the rebellious nature of teenagers during the pandemic and the natural disregard for rules all of us have had to abide by the whole year. The film was set up into three sections, the first showing the ‘first lockdown’, the second showing the easing of restrictions over the summer and peoples want to socialise and party, then finishing off the film on a cliff hangar as it is announced once again we are going into a lockdown. The film was filmed from a U.K perspective not a Jersey one. I think the film is very effective as it shows a clear message about rebellion and how people as a whole struggle to follow rules, especially life changing ones. Additonally the audio in the film allowed me to create lots of subtle messages and really emphasize certain political and personal beliefs and opinions about events this year.