Equality and Diversity

* all images my own. 

I'm currently doing my Art and Design Foundation course and thought I'd share some of my recent work. I wanted to share this particular project as I feel it is something more of us need to educate ourselves on. The project was titled Equality and Diversity and I decided to look at sexual assault and the way in which we view the victims, this idea of victim blaming and look at the vulnerability and naivety of some people's views on sexual assault. 

I was inspired to look at sexual assault after the recent BBC 3 documentary, Is This Rape? Sex on Trail. After watching this documentary I was horrified by the lack of knowledge of what is deemed sexual assault and some of the teens understanding and views towards sexual assault. One girl believed if you kissed someone at a party you were agreeing to have sex with them. This lack of understanding is not only scary but something teens and young adults should be fully aware of. Consent is absolutely necessary, whether you've had sex with this person before, whether you are drunk, it doesn't matter if there is no consent it is sexual assault. It is not acceptable for people to blame the victim if they were drunk or under the influence, it doesn't matter what the victim was wearing, it doesn't matter if the victim didn't verbally say no, if it wasn't consenting, if they didn't want to, it was sexual assault. I feel as a society these issues and more knowledge on sexual assault needs to be a part of the education system. If we as a society aren't educated on the matter how we know what is wrong and what is right? 

I wanted to portray this in my project and created these close up images of the body. I wanted to express the vulnerability of the body and how victims of sexual assault having a metaphoric imprint on their skin from the offender. I didn't want to create graphic images of a sexual nature, but for the images to not necessarily obviously represent the meaning behind them. This links to the representation of the images for how sexual assault victims carry this burden unseen day to day. I wanted these images to be powerful but to allow everyone to interpret them individually.