Mark Marking

Over half term I had to create 10 pages of work relating to mark making and to my journey. I found this quite overwhelming as I wasn't sure how I'd start. I began my starting with lines using varying colours of biro. The piece on the left was inspired by maps which I'd looked at when researching my journey. I used contour lines to mimic the mountains, and the red and blue colours were used on some of the maps also. On the right, I used the hatching and two shades of blue biro to create an abstract gemstone from my ring which I'd used to focus on in my matchbox. I positioned the lines to reflect how the light was reflecting off of the stone, the denser harsh lines for more shadowed areas, and either no lines, or light spread apart ones for where more light was.

contour lines to reflect a map from 1940s

hatching to reflect a gemstone in a ring

Next I focused on ink more, I created this one my using just water to wet the paper in squares before dripping ink along it and allowing it to bleed into the water, before continuing to the edge of the page. This piece was used to symbolize the routes taken out of Burma in 1942. The bold lines represent the paths people could take, how they appear so clear from the start, but as the lines continue, they hit and spread out. This represents, a few things, the bewilderment of being lost, or having to leave everything behind in order to stay alive, or the valleys and dense jungles people had to walk through, and unfortunately my great granddad entered a valley but never made it out alive.

 This piece has a similar meaning to the one above, but I used wrinkled newspaper to represent mountains and valleys, and the various shades and thicknesses of ink represent the various amounts of people on each route, and the marks around those lines were created by dipping crumpled newspaper into ink and printing them on the page, I took this from the stippling technique and I think it adds another layer to this piece. It adds more dimension and the angles of the stippling mimic the angles of the newspaper, which due to being crumpled adds to texture.

This piece I continued trying the stippling technique but with I used bubble wrap instead of newspaper, the layers of the marks are meant to resemble the Hukawng Valley, I couldn't find any photos for inspiration taken during 1942 (when people evacuated) however, I found this associated press arial photograph of the valley in 1944, after they build a road along it. I could develop this idea further by maybe adding colour to make it seem more relatable, as in todays society a black and white photograph of history is somewhat isolated due to the lack of detail thats ben able to of been captured in 1944 and even before.

This piece on the right I used the wavy lines which were influenced by the mountains, and trails from maps and also the emotion in the mark making to show how lost and confused people would have felt having being forced to leave their home. The whispy and fast movement lines show how all-over-the-place their minds would have been, and how hazy their view of life must have been as they left everything they had behind in order to live