Charlie Ellis

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.

Returning to our studies after the Spring Break, I was reminded of the thematic research that we had started with Better Lives towards the end of the last term. These investigations into the historical and cultural identities of one of the world’s continents both completely diverted and simultaneously, perfectly explained the need for our earlier ‘Better Lives Lectures’. 

Given our first task of tactfully researching a chosen continent’s culture, I realised that the overarching theme for the unit that looked to expose all of our hypocrisies was designed quite legitimately as an institution’s briefing to its employees before a potentially compromising job. I assume this was set-up to role play the positions we are now in as creatives in a post-modern society, to prepare us for an even further globalised future of intersectionality and proposed environmental sustainability.

Essentially, since being given something to apply some progressive ideas to, I have found it extremely straightforward to address every step of our process in understanding a cultural stimulus and developing it into an outcome. Now, my Better Lives Unit doesn’t feel like the same crash-course in our industry’s already quite evident immorality, It has just provided a broad backbone from which to build any sort of skeleton around an argument we wish to make in an upcoming project. In fact, my response to these sorts of conversations, when led by an institution and consumed by a large group of people is that all sorts of details and intricacies are inevitably going to be missed or disproportionately focused on; leaving a cohort of people questioning each of their subject positions with relation to each other.

This project has so far allowed each member of the class to find their own chosen subject matter, entry point and context based around the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ that is proposed to be adapted for an alternative nationality of the same character roster. This allows genuine interest in a specific area to form from a wide selection of choices, introducing a personal element to the process.  After this point, we hone our selection based on our cultural study of our subject matter, hoping to gain visual and contextual elements that satisfy our artistic impressions but remain tactful in our approach and apply the best of our abilities to ensuring we do this responsibly. 

Overall, I believe the ability to have genuine discussion about identities and judgements over the appearance of certain individuals is not actually something to be afraid of at all, in fact there is nothing more important than understanding subject positions, instead of making assumptions about their lives. Essentially, when being dictated to in a large cohort of people that at an art school are likely to be far more left-leaning than others, the notion of a balanced opinion seems like it is going to become lost, eliminating the possibilities that discussion can allow. Therefore, as soon as the groups became smaller and more intimate, these possibilities opened up, and once applied to some interesting subject matters, simply strengthened our brief and gave us more to genuinely think about.

The idea of reflecting on these first weeks of lectures has proved difficult to imagine in terms of structuring a response without simply delivering a point of view that I have already expressed and investigated in the past without the need for stimulation. If I was being tasked with writing 500 words on why I feel disenfranchised with institutionalised care for issues that face the world we live in, I could do so (begrudgingly) with some efficiency. Therefore, I feel its necessary to explain my conclusion as soon as possible as I subjected myself to as much lecturing stimulus as I could, before realising UAL wasn’t quite going to affect my belief that our tutors were preaching to the converted or the uninterested.

The phrase ‘Post-Growth’ was brought up in our ‘Introduction to social responsibility’, and stuck with me as something that someone of an older generation would definitely understand to be the case, no doubt due to the huge technological and economic advancements of the recent decades. However, I think this only tells half the story as not only has our western culture reached a point of such enormous growth that we are in a state of shock and disarray, we have been able to completely acknowledge the damage this has caused to all walks of life, be it mental or physical health and damage to the environment itself. For me this has gone past Post-Growth into Post-Fuck Up. Unfortunately we have been brought up into over-consumption, probably under no fault of those around us, but as always by the corporation owners who have never cared about the individual. (The Straight white male devil that the art school community has been conditioned to demonise regardless of context.)

In fact, the only lectures that I felt spoke to the obvious need to kill consumer culture before its too late were the ones one might disregard as unrelated to the problem of how to tackle institutionalised non-sustainability and discrimination. A student who has chosen to study at the London College of fashion for their love of the Fashion industry is likely to see that the need to be genuinely wild in our human identities and that as adults we can have the agency to cry if we want to, is positive for our mental state or physical well-being but isn’t going to bring themselves to a point of comfortability with their materialistic practise in a world that’s so heavily compromised by these issues.

To me, this means there are those in the room who are raring to reach positions of influence in which to put positively responsible actions into place if they are not already, because as I mentioned we are Post- Fuck Up. Yet, there are those who’s love for what consumerism brings them hasn’t effected their lives enough just yet. To be dictated to as a whole unit of this mixture feels quite frustrating.