"Welcome to the Village of Laketide" is part of my final project of my undergraduate degree, relating to my concept project 'Colony 5'.
“Laketide” is a fictional village set in the 21st century unwelcoming to strangers and harsh to its own inhabitants. Set after their natural environment and ecosystem is destroyed in an ambiguous and unexplained event, their only goal is survival and maintaining a sense of community.
In this village, a new poster is issued on the noticeboard each week.
See below for the process.
Process
This piece was inspired by films like "The Silent Village" (1943), a British propaganda film. It re-enacts the Nazi massacre of the Czech village of Lidice by setting it in a Welsh mining village. Little is shown of the Nazi occupation, their presense is only implied through other means. I was interested in the strangeness brought across by the apparent nonchalance of the villagers. They're shown to barely have any reaction to the Nazis, making it seem normal. This jarring sense of normal was an idea I was working towards.
Stylistically, I was inspired by the flat and textures colours, cyborg characters and illustration style of artist @deathandmilk.
Mio Im's isolated subjects have a strangeness to them, tranquil and haunting, like the subjects have accepted and are at peace with their odd fates. It was this feeling of leaving the audience wanting to know more about their world that I wanted to instil in my work.
In order to figure out the best way to bring across the oddness and underlying tension in the village, I experimented with drawing dark subjects that I felt could lead a viewers intrigue in the right way.
I tried a combination of digital illustration and collage before realising that the language and words would be the most effective part of the posters. I decided to leave aside the illustrations and amplify the coercive language idea, following a typography-only route.
I letterpress printed the posters using woodblock type to play on a safe and homely feeling to contrast with the coercive language. There’s a push and pull in the language, in the same way as there is in coercion and propaganda, being aggressive yet nostalgic and genuine, assisted by the feel behind a letterpress print.
