This project is about my culture. I grew up under anarchist parents, specifically the environment of my dad’s anarcho-punk band. I spent a good chunk of my childhood traveling to different countries and sleeping backstage at festivals and gigs.
Whilst researching and developing that concept, one idea became increasingly interesting to me. These people were wild rule-breakers who squatted in their house and would get arrested regularly - how did they become my parents now, who take me to dentist appointments and cook my tea? I thought it might be interesting to interview them and find out about this transition. My initial aim was to create something that showed the present day lives of these people and see how different everything is.
However, after the interviews my idea was slightly different. I had a set series of questions that I asked and whilst they were answering, both my mum and dad would be running around the house looking for something to show me to aid their story. These were usually random objects that I’ve seen thousands of times, but never cared to know the stories behind them. They both had so many of these objects. I realised that maybe after having children you have to go through a sort of baseline trainsition to be able to do parenthood correctly; It seemed to me like they essentially stopped the reckless side of their lives, but kept artefacts and relics that represented a time that is important to them. Based off this idea, I asked them to collect 4/5 of their favourite artefacts, and I did a second set of recorded interviews, asking questions specifically about what they had chosen.
With this project I wanted to showcase the favourite relics of my parents and the importance of each object to them. This exhibition is aimed at ex-punks and people that have an interest in that anarcho-punk politics world. Artful Echos also heavily features politics, photography and graphic design history. The reasoning for creating this exhibition is to show the history and back stories of two seemingly normal people, and I hope that the objects and their descriptions are as interesting to everyone as they are to me.
After I had conducted the interviews, I took photographs of all of the objects against a white background. The best images were chosen and I put a coloured background on them to make the images stand out more - the white background did not represent the vibrant history of these two people. Putting the bright colours against the objects massively changed the feel of this exhibition, from something I wouldn’t look twice at to something that would catch my eye straight away. I printed them onto A2 and framed them.
I also created a catalogue for the exhibition, a small publication that shows all of the pictutes and their descriptions, alongside the address of the gallery and the date. I contacted a local gallery and asked if It was okay for me to use their name and logo for this ‘exhibition’, and they said yes.
An idea for a second exhibition could be finding two people from a different walk of life, who have also lived interesting pasts and now have to navigate ‘normal’ life. For example, I could interview two ex political prisoners who served a long sentence, and see their current lives, how they have adapted, and what artefacts they have kept from that time. I would like for future exhibitions to follow the same political route that this one does, as I believe that is a crucial part of Artful Echoes and what I would like to focus on in my work in the future.
