Continuing to experiment combining drawing styles and using the combination of of images to portray a narrative in my work, I began another series of pieces working over printed imagery. Once again I wanted my personal connection to the theme of Cultural Re-evaluation to drive the work, partly due to the assessment of my practice by Artist and Writer Jade Montserrat whom felt that if I was through reproduction of images to expose to a viewer the most vulnerable and personal experience of victims such as the colonised people of the world that I too should be expected to be forthcoming and honest. To reveal the origins of any of my bias or prejudice, my ignorance or privilege. The second reason that I featured so much imagery that pertained to my personal experience was due to the fact that I felt that my upbringing and subsequent experiences, would be familiar to many people of my background one which makes up a very large percentage of this country and one capable of effecting society positively if forced to confront the implications of there existence in the space they occupy.
The printed images on these works are screenshots taken from the 1964 film Zulu. Many of the same images would feature in my Degree Show final piece and represented the popularisation of colonial narratives in British society. As a child I watched this film and felt nothing of supporting the outpost of British Soldiers defending their position as invaders, against the "uncivilised" masses of Africans attempting to repel them. While making this series I wrote a comparison however, between this film. Whose director a socialist, left the United States due to his beliefs and broke South African Apartheid laws to pay the black actors in Zulu the same as the white extras, with the later film Black Hawk Down, made thirty years later but continuing the Nobel Savage narrative of earlier works. I allowed the stills from Zulu to, as it were lead the narrative of the individual pieces. For example, in one piece showing the Zulu Army from the British perspective. I included a line drawing taken from a famous photograph by Samuel Nzima of a man carrying a 13 year old boy, shot fatally during a protest in south Africa. The inclusion an attempt at humanising the struggle of African people against colonial rule. In other drawings I featured more personal elements particularly from my youth. One shows footballers Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and Ricardo Carvalho, who played for Chelsea FC, the football team I supported fanatically as a child. Their inclusion, a metaphor for the way in which one may support, despite their better judgement, "their team" despite their failings. In this case the team stands in for their nation or perhaps their race.
The success in the collaging of images in these pieces, laid the groundwork for my continual utilising of this method to raise questions of social and historical preconceptions and to deconstruct British cultural norms in the later canon of my practise.