We were given different phrases to choose from and we had to develop one of the phrases into fine art. I started to look into different ways that “Happy to talk” could be interpreted. I thought about the literal and lateral meaning of the phrase. Mental health came across my mind when I first thought about this and then I started to look further into it and think about the ways how people don’t communicate the way they used to in the olden days because of technology. As there is a big discussion of the use of mobile phones I decided to look into it and see how it affects our communication in our daily lives. When people use their mobile phones especially at the dinner table it makes others around you feel less important and as though you care more about your phone than you do of the people around you. I wanted to display this through pictures and text on top of the photo. the placement, size and font of the text is something else I focused on to communicate the meaning i’m trying to portray. For example, the picture with the couple on their phone and text over their face shows a lack of identity which seems robotic. It portrays a lack of emotion as they are consumed into the technological world of their phones and are oblivious to the people around them which represents how they are not happy to talk as they focused on their phones rather than the physical beings around them. I also looked at animals and saw two different approaches to this, one of them being how we treat our pets as though they are a family member and usually we have a deep emotional connection with our pets even though they physically can’t talk. The other being how some people treat their pets as though they understand situations and know what they are saying. They talk to them and sometimes use their animals as a support system or treat them as some sort of therapist, I thought ‘Happy to talk’ using animals could be an interesting way of capturing this lateral meaning of the phase.
Agnes Kindt 