free-not-free

Here are a couple of monoprints I made recently. Beginning to explore the flow of light and shadows in and out of doorwarys and window panes, as a metaphor for the freedom/containment theme I have been exploring.

l looked at the European Union of Human Rights website today. Informative but soo unimaginative. Vital, integral human messages, told as blandly as they possibly could.

I want to do an art/education project looking at articles 1-30. I want to see how they can be approached in as creative way as possible. With children 6 yrs +.

Any ideas where to look for funding? I’ll keep an eye out. I’m not ready just yet anyway. I need to keep on with the learning and research. I’ve been looking into artists working with social motivation/protest/activism. And looking into the law system, and how change happens.

These are the prints I was making on Friday, when I posted I was in the studio.

any feedback, critical or otherwise, is welcome!

Aung San Sui Kyi, this quote is from her in Saturday’s Guardian

‘”This word ‘free’,” she says of herself and the other prisoners, “we all think that we are freer than the people outside because we don’t have to compromise with our conscience. We are doing what we believe in. We are not locked in by the bars of guilt. So I think this is what made us choose imprisonment rather than to stay – in quotes – ‘free’. For us, that is how our lives are.”

Those wise words encapsulate something of what I was thinking about in creating these works. The print monotype of her home, particulary, and the ‘house arrest’ piece.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/16/interv…

Today I am in the print workshop (Double Elephant, Exeter) working on monotype drawing prints. Its going ok. I started with four. I think 2 or possibly 3 may work out. I am overlaying images of boys running, their silhouettes, with urban/country scapes. Some of these images are from photos sent to me by a good friend in LA (who regularly sends me pics, thanks Kim!), some are my own… Avon Dam (Dartmoor, Devon) Cowley Road (Oxford) Treehouse in forest (somewhere near Lyon, France).

Through this I am exploring their place (by ‘their’ I mean, my boys and by extension, children generally) in our environments. It is significant they are without adult company or supervision.