In the B-Block gallery space first year students from our Animation, Illustration and Graphic Communication courses are celebrating the culmination of all their hard work over the last few months working on the collaborative Field Project ‘Uncle Tom’.
In order to tell stories about ‘now’ we often have to look at ‘then’. Researching the story of Uncle Tom and the Welsh connection to the Spanish Civil War allows us to reflect upon the very raw, often too close, atrocities happening now.
From re-imagining Guernica for modern times to exploring the characters from the 1930s Spanish Civil War, Animators, illustrators, and Graphic Communicators worked collaboratively to explore current issues through propaganda, allegory, and satire.
When telling stories we are often close to the truth of our reality but we can bear horrors and atrocities more easily when it is told from a slightly periscope’d perspective. Allegory and satire take us to the sharp edges of humour and ridiculousness, and from here we can tell a fairy-tale which is about politics, war, or other difficult subject matter. Propaganda beguiles us and the ‘posterly’ response, inspired by the posters of previous wars and uprisings, is profound in it’s rhetoric.
In a post-truth era there is always another story to be told, another way to look at the world, and more to be revealed.
A private view on Tuesday the 28 March 2017 provided an excellent platform to talk about the work and receive plenty of positive feedback.
UNCLE TOM remains in the foyer gallery until Friday 31 March 2017 so please come and explore the “sharp edges of Activism, Propaganda and ,Satire” on offer!”
