My brother (who the project is based on) is an apprentice farrier, so he had a load of horse shoes that he made in the forge and so I asked if I could have them to use for my project. Horse shoes are related to luck, a symbol of luck, and before his holiday to laganas, zante he had tattooed ‘luck is for the weak’ with two horseshoes on the back of his legs, because he said he doesn’t believe in luck he believes in hard work. After what happened In Zante he told me that when he was in hospital he thought about getting the tattoos covered up, because he said he was ‘one lucky bastard’ and if it wasn’t for luck he wouldn’t be here. Then he carried on and said to me, but then I realised, ‘luck is for the weak, and in my time of weakness luck saved me’ that weekend was very unlucky for Taylor to end up in the situation he did, however he had so much luck in the way that he found his rep on the street after it happened and she wouldn’t normally be there but it just so happened that this night she walked down there and she was able to help Taylor get to the emergency medical centre, then also we had a lot of luck with flights etc, and getting him home and everything. I think what really made us realise how lucky he was was when we were in Addenbrookes hospital and we were speaking to a woman whose husband was beaten in Norwich by a gang and was left deaf, had brain damage and was unable to carry on working or even carry on with his normal life.
So basically luck had a big part in this story of what happened to my brother and I wanted to somehow include that quote that he said to me ‘Luck is for the weAk, and in my time of weakness luck saved me’ so I thought about creating a print with horseshoes, then include the text with it.
I created this prints by inking up the horse shoe with block printing ink, and then pressing the paper onto the shoe. This creased the paper slightly, but worked better then pressing the horseshoe onto the paper, because when pressing the shoe onto the paper it didn’t pick up all of the groves and details, whereas by pressing the paper into the shoe it picked up more details and looked more like a horse shoe.
These were just a practise, now I want to print onto some big sheets of card and include the text somehow. I also thought of having some of the horse shoes upside down and some upright to represent good luck and bad luck.
For my final installation piece I might even just use the actual horse shoes.
