Rebecca East UWE Illustration

For our anthology asignment, my group and I decided to look at the theme of visions of the future, in response to the brief of 'The Unseen'. As well as sharing the same over-arching themes, we also wanted our stories to have aesthetic coherence in the zine, so we decided to stick to a mostly monochromatic colour palette with accented use of colour. I created a short story exploring the idea of remote warfare, and toyed with the idea that in the future conflicts could be conducted like video games, like a very exaggerrated version of the kind of drone warfare currently used today. I wanted to create an image of the future where people fighting in wars are so detatched from their actions that they treat the very real people and place they're attacking as if they're just enemies in a video game with no real consequence.  I also made the cover for our zine, it's supposed to depict TV screens with distorted ad abstract references to the content of our stories on them.  

After the first few workshops of the module, I knew I wanted to create a 3D piece inspired by the work of Fraces Glessner Lee, and I was very excited about the idea of making a large scale dollhouse depicting come kind of macabe scene.  I've worked with 3D miniatures and dioramas before and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'd never made something on this scale, so I was very excited about the prospect but had a lot of logistical aspects to work out first. I looked at a few different artists and representations of dioramas for inspiration and insight into how to portray these kinds of scenes. Being a horror fan, the miniatures used in the film 'Hereditary' instantly came to mind as a reference not only for constructing dioramas, but for how they can be used to strengthen certain narratives in film and photography. Initially I planned on building the house myself, as I had a certain layout of rooms in mind that I thought I would need to construct myself to achieve, however I f

 Below is a photo-tour of my final outcome. I made a dollhouse depicting a crime scene in a family home. The wooden dollhouse was purchased online and then painted and furnished by myself. All of the details including wall coverings, floorings, furniture and decorations were made by me.  I ended up deciding against putting any figures into the house as I wan't to create the idea of a crime scene that the viewer can 'investigate' and piece together small details to decide what they think may have happened. I think this is a much more interesting and engaging narrative device than simply having a scene being acted out by figurines, which was my original idea.