What Gives Me Hope

I had a couple of vague ideas when I first saw the prompt for this week, but nothing that I felt would visually translate very well. Then, I caught my dog and cat in the middle of a carefree afternoon snuggle session and immediately knew the two little beings that give me more hope than anything else, every day, would be the perfect subjects for this week’s prompt.

I snapped a few pictures of them which I’ll include here:

And since I’m always looking for an excuse to practice some digital illustration, I used Procreate on my iPad to create a digital painting using my photos as references. Then I found a quote that really explains exactly why these little creatures give me so much hope, and hand lettered it across the illustration. Here’s the final product! I hope it gives a cozy, sort of holiday vibe 🙂

Week 8 Post!

The passion and narrative that JoAnne Ardinger and Rosalie Miller brought to the story they tell in their documentary “Personhood” resonated with me in a lot of ways. As a female-identifying individual living in this current society in which women have to fight for autonomy over their own bodies, I found their work to be really inspiring and loved how they hope it will serve as an important educational tool. 

In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the work I focused my thesis around in graduate school. I attended University of California, Santa Cruz, for a MA program in Theatre Arts, specifically focusing in Scenic Design for the stage. Aside from a lot of hands-on projects and work as lead designer on a number of productions within the department, I was required to conduct a research project and write a thesis on my process and findings. 

I had just come from spending the majority of my undergraduate career bouncing around and exploring different facets of theater. Specifically, studying dramatic theories and falling in love with the process of applying various lenses to a script to analyze the content and emphasize various perspectives/messages. When I finally started to take on designer roles and move into that direction, I found myself relying on a process that in my mind made up a more ‘baseline design approach,’ and creating designs quickly but without much agency, awareness, or actual attention paid to the impact of the various steps in the design process.  I was curious how a designer’s specific thinking, framing of source material, research, and steps taken in coming to a design solution shapes a final product on stage. 

This is what I sought to explore when I first started my research for my thesis— HOW can the design process be used to help support messages for social change, and shape how these messages are conveyed visually on stage? But when my preliminary research pulled my attention to the extreme gender inequality in hiring in the theater industry, I knew I needed to focus my research through this one particular lens. 

Thus, I crafted my entire thesis around experimentation and research on a decisively “feminist design process.” In beginning to explore the existing framework for feminist design, it became quickly evident how new this line of thought is. There were plenty of sources on feminist methodologies and feminist theater, but hardly any sources that exist currently that discuss feminist design strategies or methodologies. After much digging, I unearthed the works of Dolores Ringer and Raynette Halvorsen Smith, both contemporary feminist theater designers and teachers who have begun to examine the current processes for design and expand on them to work toward a decisively feminist approach. 

Her chapter in the book Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics is entitled “Re-Visioning Scenography: A Feminist’s Approach to Design for the Theatre” became my roadmap. She presents questions and a framework of considerations that aligned with everything I felt a “feminist designer” should be thinking about. The ideas broke easily into a list in my mind:

1. De-objectify female characters.
2. Assert that women’s personal experience is not trivial.
3. Feminist design practice might intentionally combine internal and external images and emotionally derived images. 
4. Eliminate the physical and psychic barriers between actor and audience in a way that permits an egalitarian sharing of experience, emotion, and ideas. 
5. Take audience space into the stage space. 
6. Understand collaboration.
7. The combination of what appears to be loosely related/unrelated images– collage. 
8. “Stop being slaves” to conventional theatrical realism and stylistic consistency.
9. Emphasis on transformation rather than on self-recognition. 
10. Envision our audience as female. 

With this framework I was able to apply these ideas to my process on a few different shows and compare the results. 

It was an interesting process, but to get to my point in explaining my previous research– these are still ideas I’m really passionate about, and have already dedicated a good chunk of time to, but I’d love to flesh it out even more.

I think it’d be really interesting to revisit some of these ideas, especially with my more recent career pivot. The design field as a whole is very male-based and I think it’s important to continue playing with this feminist methodology and see how it expands in graphic design and digital art forms. Moving forward I’ll be sure to keep my previous research in the back of my mind and hope to start to incorporate those ideas into my graphic design practice.