Proposal

To me Traditionally a community is a public audience that come together to understand a present, to see visions of the future or share emotions. In theses ways these people are linked and that what makes them a community. The idea of communities in that sense has been lost mainly due to the Internet, The Internet plays home to many communities!

However this is a world we can all share, the experience is becoming private, individual and even solitary, the sense of community feels real but its virtual. This has let me to believe that although virtual communities are innovative and forever evolving traditional communities are more interesting towards my practice.

Chad Eaton Started a tee shirt company called TIMBER! in 2006. TIMBER! is a t-shirt company based on a story about lumberjacks, their bosses (the top hat guys with an excessive hair curse.) and a bigfoot stuck between both their worlds. What I want to take from chad’s work is how playful it is with the viewer, and how you can almost interact or animate the story with yourself.

Geographical location for the last two years had me thinking about how I would like to comment on communities in Yorkshire. And that’s where I started the research that has brought me forward. Looking at Robert G Neville’s “Yorkshire miners in cameras“ although the book was serious the imaging within was fascinating and each one carried its own story that can be extracted from within. Particularly I loved the facial features and characteristic's that makes these miners look so interesting. How ever most interest image I found was one which features a rescue miner with his budgie. I loved the relationship the image created between the man and the budgie, from this I knew I wanted to expand upon this relationship.

I want my work to spark the imagination creating a relationship between the minors, their budgies and the onlookers that are viewing the work. I like the idea that these characters are trapped within the birdhouses, like we have done to the birds over the many years, keeping them as pets for our own amusement, I plan on my work commenting this reverse roll play in a visually pleasing way.

I have been working in the wood work studio creating these bird houses, I choose birdhouses (over birdcages and trees) because of the simplicity of them they create a really basic but interesting canvas, i‘ve experimented with different ways of illustrating these canvas's the most effective method I have found so far is using theses water based paint pens, however I am eager to experiment with screen printing to create the characters. And using the cnc machine in the wood work studio, which I hope to make tiling for the roofs of the bird houses.