This project began with a workshop task that allowed me to explore how design is used to effectively communicate with an audience. The task was to take a poem and create an expressive piece of art that communicated an emotion, social movement or historical event.
The piece could not contain any text. The goal was to present a message entirely through imagery.
Here is the poem I chose: Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
The feeling that struck with me when reading this poem was the pain and helplessness I feel when seeing somebody suffer and being unable to assist them. I wanted to convey the image of something falling apart or about to break and there is visibly nothing that can be done to prevent it. I came up with the image of a rope being pulled so tight that it is being stretched and torn until it's hanging on by a single thread.
Above is the expressive piece I developed for the workshop. I used procreate on my iPad to draw and paints tearing piece of rope. I decided for it to be vertical rather than horizontal to suggest that something or someone was hanging onto it and would fall when it eventually snaps.
Here is the feedback I received for this piece. My classmates were tasked to guess which poem, from i list, I had presented an emotion from.
Unfortunately nobody guessed the poem correctly but they did get the general idea of what emotion i was trying to represent. Some people related it to the feeling of a relationship about to end which is a similar kind of strain as to the imagery I had thought about during the development. I think that my artwork was too vague for this workshop task but was successful in relating to the emotion that I took from the poem.