This is the list of ideas I have originally come up with, hoping these will be annotated at the meeting:
Background Thoughts:
· What does it mean to be male or female? Do we do things/ buy things/ wear things because of what we see in the media?
· Would men want to look muscular, or women want to look slim if there was no such media coverage? How would be see ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’ without the media?
· Would gender portrayal be any different if the media was completely dominated by a group of men or group of women?
Basic start-out ideas for sessions:
· Cutting out images of men/women in magazines and combining different body parts to create a new person
· Draw how you would like to look if you were born as the opposite sex
· Close your eyes and draw what you think an ideal man/woman would look like (could create a concertina book of these images) Look at how children draw and see people in early stages of development. Innocence of it. Psychology behind it?
· Find images of genders from past works of art. ‘Idealised’ and ‘non-idealised’ images and analyse them, what works best? What comes across as being more meaningful? Would the image have looked different if a male painted a portrait of another man, or woman paint a portrait of other women? Do you think men and women see the body differently?
· Re-create famous paintings/portraits in the studio. (look at the ‘Remake’ Project) Think about if the pose would be interpreted differently on a different background. How could the participant bring their own sense of personality into the pose via props/lighting/colours etc.
