Political Satire Collage

 It is the 29th October as I write this.....

This is week six, and the first week that I have not travelled through to Sunderland for my Creative Arts Module with Keith Nevens.

 

I had a banging headache and had to decide whether to undertake the nearly two hour drive. I reluctantly decided not to.   I say reluctantly, because I enjoy the experience of the classroom and mixing with my fellow students.  I have not had the opportunity to meet them all properly yet, so I feel any time spent with them is time worth taking.

 

Instead I logged onto the Microsoft Teams app and joined the class that way.  I was pleasantly surprised that it still felt that I was included in the class.  Other classes I have been doing via the Teams app have been totally online, so everyone was in the same boat. It was an interesting experience to be the other side of the computer screen for once.

 

Today’s class was about Political Satire and we were asked to create a collage of a political event that we felt strongly about.  At the forefront of the news this week has been the debate about providing free lunches for children during term time.  While I can appreciate both sides of the argument, I do feel that children are not to blame for the current climate and if we can make sure they are fed, then we should feed them.  It seems quite mean for the MP’s to vote against providing them with a free meal when they themselves claim £25.00 a day for food allowances as well as having heavily subsidised food offerings in the Houses of Parliament.

 

Based on this I decided to do a collage piece which I called “The Great Divide”.  The piece shows MP’s and their friends, sitting down to a table laden with all sorts of foods  (mainly cut out of a Farmfoods leaflet, which in itself is a little ironic as the food offerings are quite cheap options for families and I am not sure would be a wealthy politicians choice of nourishment.)  On the other side of the canvas is a photograph of Marcus Rashford kicking the word ‘Boris’. Kicking him into action was the objective I was going for with that image.  Marcus is surrounded by photos of children and some well-chosen words like ‘Fridge Envy’ and ‘Victim’.

 

The piece is divided by a solid yellow line, slightly off centre to show imbalance.  In the top right corner is a question mark to try and get the viewer to think about what the piece means.

 

I enjoyed this session, but then I enjoy any kind of hands-on creativity. I am not fussy about what medium I use, if I can express something within it.

 

I especially enjoyed learning about William Hogarth, I found his paintings and engravings fascinating, so much so that I spent a little extra time doing internet searches to find out more.

 Check him out yourself if you like...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hogarth