Saturday 24 October 2015

A quick idea - Needing to be named

Just a quick line before I rush off out for the day.

I have been thinking about which people I want to represent.  Mostly they are what I call 'the little people'.  I am not interested in the great and the good.  But often the unknown people who do good and kind things that ease life's path.

I was thinking about the WW1 portraiture exhibition at the NPG that I went to about 18 months ago.  This exhibition made the point that people with high status in WW1 were portrayed in named portraits, clean, fully suited and booted, with medals etc.  However if a lower rank were portrayed, they would be a generic type, unnamed, often dirty, or dead.  So there is something about the everyday and mundane being disassociated with and individual name.

Last Christmas I had a trip to Liverpool for a few days, and went to the Liverpool Museum amongst others.  There was a great exhibition about women of Liverpool over the last century.  But what was interesting, was they had made a great play of displaying the names of the women, and a short note about why they were significant.

I want my work to be about the domestic and mundane, the unsung heros/heroines.  And these individuals need to be named.

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