Friday 9 January 2009

Yeah, so... don't wear fur.


I saw this woman in town today (is it wrong to take pictures of strangers? I don't know...) I was walking along behind her for ages, and was amazed by how real her fur coat was, you could almost see the form of each tiny little individual creature in it... I wanted to touch it, but that definitely would have been wrong.

But yes, the Anti Fur/ PETA project!
Ideas developing...
I think that 'shock tactics' - in anti fur campaigning (And much else, for that matter...) are over done. Be it the blood and gore, the naked celebrities, the statistics... people just ignore them, look away. People choose not to pay attention to that kind of stuff, it's all just another one of the many barriers we put up in day to day life.
I think that the best way of capturing people, drawing them in, and hopefully getting across a very important message... is by creating something beautiful, and intriguing. I think that people let their guard down when they see something that catches their eye and interests them... and I for one am certainly more receptive to a message that is presented in a visually appealling way.

My tutor didn't seem to like this idea, or possibly I didn't explain it well enough, but I'm going to soldier on anyway, and hope for the best...

My main idea currently is to create a simple fur coat form, out of animal shapes, because I think sometimes people get disconnected from the fact that it is actually ANIMAL SKIN they're wearing... not just another sort of fabric.
I'm thinking of accompanying this fairly aesthetically pleasing image with some more shocking text... something along the lines of:

"Your coat is made out of the skin of dead aninals.
Skin that was peeled off while the animal was still alive, screaming and writhing in agony.
Then left, still blinking and twitching, on a pile of dying corpses, muscle and flesh exposed."

Here's what I've made so far. For the final piece I'll spend longer smoothing out the animal shapes, and laying them out so they fit together a bit better, but this is the basic idea, and colour scheme, and how I'd like it to look.


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