Design Boards

Evaluation

This project has been highly challenging and ambitious. It was nerve racking initially collaborating with external clients, but the staff and the Refugee Council where excellent in supporting and working on this project. This was a strong platform for working collaboratively, and researching. The outcomes from the workshops did meet the aims, the two that took place within the councils building did promote unity and create a welcoming environment. The work the organisation Getaway Girls allowed me gain extra information. The self-led workshop did require a lot of adapting to fit with the time frame of the project and other constrains, but the workshop was carried out successfully. With this group of individual, they are highly vulnerable, so taking photos of them, I felt, would have made them feel uncomfortable. Even though this would have would clear method of documenting interview, I felt it was more important to make them feel at ease and to try and avoid being too intrusive. From the sketches and notes I produced key narratives started to pop out. One of the main narratives came from a young girl who attend the self-led workshop, who told me her
aspiration was to live in a house in the middle of a forest with lots of birds. This spanned off into producing a series of four fabric wall hangings based on the stories the participants told me. Even though this project has been hard going both with subject and work load, I have discovered I prefer
working individually because you have control over time management and the structure of the project. But first hand interviews and conversations with the people the social / political issue directly effects are invaluable.

Final series of prints

There are reoccurring features that are on all the of prints. The birds (metophore for migration), grass and in the final three the trees. I wanted aspects of the young girl's aspiration to be in some form across the series.
I wanted this to be the key narrative to follow. This has been incorporated into things that I have learned about refugees and asylum seekers, also key motifs that have come up during the project (the tree). The color blue worked well and ties the series together nicely. I am disappointed I didn't have more time to explore more of the narratives I sourced from the conversations with the participants. It would have been good to do some more prints featuring the stories I heard of trying to adapt to living in Leeds. But printing onto fabric and creating the hangings was something that I really enjoyed and makes a strong presentation method. Also with fabric, it can be made into a multiple of different products and garments. In the future projects, I want to explore this more! Taking a political, social, environmental issue and creating them into designs.

Final card designs.

The aim of making these cards was to give the images more context. If they had existed just on their own it would have been hard to distinguish the meaning. On the front of the cards if a motif that exists inside the larger print and on the back, is a series of statistics about asylum seekers and refugees in the UK taken from the Refugee Council's website. One of the cards contains a quote from a participant and the final one is a statement.

These cards definitely help give more context to the larger prints and digitally printing them means that the ink textures are much clearer and they help add overall value. The image also section out key parts of the images bring more emphasis onto these specific elements. Ties the project togther. 

Exhibition layout plan

             This is an exhabition mockup plan. A layout idea I had for the exhabiting the prints.

print 4 re print and developments

I printed this image onto calio for the 4th print but later decied that it could be improved. Keeping the hand and birds in the image but changing the tree seemed like the best way round this. The trees leaves are too bold and the trunk too short. The image also looks out of place next to the other prints aswell. A more delicate and detailed approach to the tree with the grass marks at the base of will help the image wokr in the series. 

This is the developed image I just need to add the grass at the base of the tree , but I think that it already looks better than the previous print. The detail in the tree leaves and the texture of the branches should help it to work in the series. 

4th print

Final print ! This is an accumulation of the themes in the image and the overall arching theme of the project. The symbol of the tree is one that kept occurring throughout the project from the project with the council and the tree mural to the aspiration of the young girl. I came with the motif of the hand inside another hand quite quickly. I thought it would work well for a symbol representing unity and the best place to add this is in the tree. It rounds off the series well and represents the research journey to.