MA Fine Art
Rohingya Boy on Bigbury Beach
This video documents my final project for an MA in Fine Art at Arts University Plymouth, completed in August 2022. The work was mixed media, including oil pastels, oil paint, cold wax and sand, on a support of repurposed brown packaging paper.
Drawing on a decade of experience in the field of human rights activism, I was interested in empathy and the lack of it. What makes us connect with the suffering of some people and not others? Can art bridge empathy gaps between the most privileged and the most persecuted?
This painting places the plight of the Rohingya people, who are undergoing genocide, here in my local Devon landscape, inviting discussion on the global crisis of mass human displacement.
Receiving 'Board of Governors Postgraduate Award 2022'
The evolution of the work, from the first rough sketch to the exhibition.
Masters Exhibition at Arts University Plymouth, 2022
Rohingya Exodus Printing
I began my MA research with experiments in printing, combining screenprinting of Rohingya refugees (the image in the foreground) with an etching of a Dartmoor tor (the image in the background). I then tried printing these images onto different background of abstract landscapes that I had made through abstract mark making techniques where I dragged acrylic paint across the paper.
Long Journey
The four images here make up one panel that is 20 x 240 cms wide, made from image transfers onto acrylic paint on board, which formed the basis for my initial MA research. The writing is from a 2000 page long data log that I was keeping from 2016 - 2017, of reports of atrocities received from the ground in Myanmar as the genocide was unfolding. The images are from photos that appeared in the media at that time as hundreds of thousands of people fled towards the border. The journey took for most took several days and in some cases weeks to arrive to Bangladesh. The final image shows a border guard in No Man's Land preventing the people from crossing the border at the end of their journey.
Forced to Flee
60 x 20cms image transfer, acrylic paint and watercolour on board. It includes images from the media of Rohingya fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh as well as extracts from the daily log of atrocities that I was keeping at that time.
Mother of Inhumanity
This wire sculpture, started as a maquette 30cms tall, prior to my masters research. It depicted a Rohingya mother, holding her unborn child wrapped in a womb of barbed wire. The woman was shrouded in her hijab and she stood in a plinth of dirty concrete. The sculpture signified many aspects of the Rohingya genocide, but left for the viewer to interpret.
Some context: In 2021, the refugee camp of one million survivors in Bangladesh was fenced in with barbed wire stood in concrete blocks and surrounded by watch towers. The Bangladeshi prime minister was hailed by the media when the refugees were allowed into Bangladesh as 'The Mother of Humanity'.
As part of my MA, I sculpted a life size version of this model. Through it I projected images of the Devon landscape, considering themes of female suffering, inequality and persecution juxtaposed against freedom.
