Reflection 3
As mentioned in my previous entry, the most important and freeing moment in this project and any of the last few months of my experience at university was when the Better Lives Unit condensed into a smaller, more intimate focus group, that had specific direction and purpose. With an extremely broad choice of potential subject matter, covering the entire Globe and any point in History; anyone would feel free to make a personal and therefore stimulating connection to their choice of culture. And so I saw an opportunity in challenging myself to study a culture, I had very little knowledge on, making me undertake an entirely necessary learning process to even scratch the surface of Inuit life.
In terms of my personal development in my own practise, this was a great exercise to get back into as I have commonly reacted to Fashion briefs negatively, opting to focus on more of my personal interests like the music industry, returning me to a research subject I’m more comfortable with. Although via this process, I have found a unique way to bring something unrelated into the realm of Fashion Illustration and thus allow myself to grow within the specification I would choose to, this preference does not prepare me quite as well for briefs that can be undertaken in a commercial space. Researching an entirely new subject matter with the proceeding context of our Better Lives lectures and the clear need to be as tactful as possible gave me the whole experience of working in my creative practise without any of my subject position effecting the documentation and curation of necessary information.
This brings me to the point at which I must respond to my brief with my practical skills, bringing in this research with strong intention to represent fact as oppose to opinion. Here, I believe I created illustrated and collaged responses that reintroduced my own personality into the project, creating emotive characters using real, referenced textures and reconstructed silhouettes. I’m sure holes could be picked in my portrayal of an Inuit father, widowed and unable to provide for his family in a relocated fairy tale, but I’m confident that the level of the project we undertook, was met with seriousness and reflection on both diversity, social responsibility and sustainability. The latter was a particular consideration for our specification in costume design, allowing us to investigate material possibilities in the context of general sustainability but to a further degree, sustainability in Lockdown. This meant, not only would we reflect on what is available to us in an environmentally conscious way, but a further degree of limitation encouraged more resourceful creativity and showed the necessity of taking situations like these as seriously as possible to inform better working attitudes.