I felt sorry for this blog, as I've only ever posted once.
This is work also from my final year, and is a series around the idea of self-sufficiency. The idea was to portray different elements of people working towards living a more self sufficient lifestyle in a heroic way. I wanted to comment on the way society has started to take notice of these ideas, and in a way living a 'greener' life has become more fashionable.
I wanted the work to have a feel of hero-esque propaganda to it, to indicate that these people were revolutionaries, and that this was the way of the future.
In a time not so long ago, our daily lives would have consisted of a very different routine to the one many of us practice today.
The community in which we lived would have been close and self-supporting, with everything you need to survive being made or produced locally. Each member of the community would offer a skill or a craft that would be used in exchange for these goods.
Today our lives reflect a very different story. After the industrial revolution took hold we turned to large-scale production line manufacturing, for our goods. Meaning that many of our local craftsmen skills were made redundant, which resulted in the population slowly losing the skills that were learnt and passed on over centuries. Today we are left with a society that is severely removed from the making processes of the goods we so readily consume.
With the use of fossil fuels we could produce far more goods, and produce them at a shockingly quicker rate compared to them being handmade. As we were able to produce more and more, our need and want for more goods steadily grew.
But today we face the reality of declining oil reserves, and other non-renewable resources, which will eventually affect the way in which we will be able to live and survive. With ¾ of our population now living in urban areas, most of whom rely on modern convinces such as electricity, gas cookers, central heating, cars and supermarkets to be able to survive on a day to day basis, and with no renewable energy sources that could rival and replace the amount of energy produced by fossil fuels, the future looks slightly less than rosy, let alone bright.
