The Journey

This is a bit of a master post all about my favourite piece of work from first year, because im not a very good blogger and theres no point chopping it up into several posts now.

So this brief was to make a book based on the theme of 'The Journey' i had been looking at Molly Soda a lot and wanted to focus on that sort of girls in their bedroom idea. My theme was the journey from childhood to adulthood focusing on teenage years, i started by focusing on my teenage years which is actually a bit embarrassing to think about but it led me to another jump off point which were a set of tarot cards because i used to be into that stuff when i was younger.

The main focus of my book was to use the tarot card archetypes and turn them into teenage girls in their bedroom, inspired by Cindy Sherman and Alis Pelleschi.I focused on doing 13 of these portraits partly because of the amount of time it actually took to stage and take the photos but also because 13 is the age where you actually become a teenager and its also considered unlucky, but maybe thats just a coincidence.

Alis Pelleschi 'Super Fans'

Another artist that provided a lot of inspiration for this project was Rania Matar, a photographer who made a series of portraits of teenage girls in their bedrooms. Her work focuses mostly on women and girls, the spaces they occupy and the relationships they have with each other. I found her work really interesting and i really liked the visuals of girls in their rooms, their personality reflected in the mess and the things they chose to display on the walls.

Brianna by Rania Matar

 I started researching tarot cards, looking at the major arcana which is like the Death card and the Sun and Moon. I made a list of all 22 cards and things that could represent these cards or things that linked to my own experience.

With some of the the cards i wanted the image to link with the original meaning of the tarot, like the Fool, which is card Zero, can represent innocence or foolishness and sometimes the major arcana is seen as his journey through life. I wanted my fool to be a girl at the start of her journey into adolescence, surrounded by things from her childhood, packing her bag for this figurative trip. Death was more about the image of the skeletal figure, i was thinking about an emaciated girl obsessed by her weight becoming this deathly figure.

Once I had all my images made i started to think about way of editing them, i didn't really have any access to photoshop or anything so i had to think of a different way of getting a visually interesting set of photos. I decided to try out some collage stuff, printing out the photos in black and white and covering select parts in glitter or paint. I think worked amazingly well on some of the photos, making them much more surrealist looking.

Death card black and white version

The Temperance card was really improved by the glitter falling from the bottles and the misty background

I created a colour version of the zine and a black and white version with only the gold and silver glitter in colour. I have to say the glitter version was my favourite even though it took a lot of my time to scan in all the little collages i had made with the photos as well as having glitter everywhere in my house for about a fortnight. The photos themselves also took a really long time to do and im glad it was only 13 because theres no way i would have time for 22. All in all i really liked this project and really like what i made despite stressing about time and computer stuff.