For my first art assignment, I decided to work with calligraphy and hand lettering. I'd seen posts featuring it on Instagram before and I always thought it looked beautiful, so I thought that I should give it a go.
My original idea was to take pictures from magazines, and write some of my favourite quotes and poems on top of it in calligraphy; and technically I still did that. But I changed my theme and the types of photos I was using. Originally I had planned to use more glossy, high end fashion type shots, and pair them with poems about the female body and societies expectations of it.
Instead, I ended up using pictures from National Geographic. I picked pictures of women and girls from different cultures, different backgrounds from my own, many of them from more oppressive or restrictive cultures than my own. I chose to write more empowering, and impactful things overtop of the pictures. Rather than focusing on the body, I decided to spotlight the issues facing these girls today, and society's disregard for them. Sometimes that manifested in poems about gender stereotypes and the male gaze, and other times in quotes about powerful women.
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| This was my first one. National Geographic said that she was from Indonesia, if I'm not mistaken. |
The quote is from a recently found but favourite poet of mine named Rupi Kaur. It says "The kindest words my father ever spoke to me: women like you drown oceans". It retrospect, I wish I had used this quote on a different picture, one featuring water, but I couldn't find any that still suited my theme.
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| For this one I tried writing over the entirety of the picture, to see what effect it would have. |
For my second try, I used a photo of several young women getting ready for a traditional Indian wedding. The poem that goes along with it is from another favourite poet of mine, Blythe Baird, who posted it to her tumblr account. It says "Amongst other contradictions, we are expected to be experienced but unentered. They want to touch us and name us after their handprints. They want us to be pretty, and then when we care about being pretty, they call us vain." My only issue is with this one is that I wished the black sharpie could have appeared a bit better nearing the end of the page. It can be a little difficult to read it at times.
I do plan to do more of these, maybe a whole series of them, I'm not entirely sure yet. I already have two other photos picked out; and now I'm just trying to find the perfect poems to match them with.
I did make a HitRecord blog, it can be found here. My user name is librariesaremyrefuge (lame, I know). I haven't posted these projects to my profile yet, I want to use a scanner to make sure they come out as good as possible, and I haven't been able to yet. They will be up soon though.
