proliferation – Rebecca Elysium

After discarding the concept of attempting to reflect the superficial and destructive ideals of freedom through connotations of the mountainous landscape and the binary opposition next to it of the caged bird, I wanted to step back and refine my concept.

Religious imagery and symbolism has always been incredibly influential to me, in particular the way it aestheticises an intangible, unfathomable concept of a deity and their virtuous, tyrranical and mystical works.

I wanted to abstract the worship of these ideals and banal symbolic images and subvert the superficial worship of them in order to reveal the true destructive and overwhelming power that the hegemonic perpetuation of these images creates. The symbols themselves are lost and de-powered, and in societies attempts to justify and achieve their hopes of these ideals they become more and more harmful and lost in the constant creation and proliferation of these tides of symbols and images.

I also decided to look at a multitude of religious imagery and symbolism in order to reflect that the worship of these aesthetic ideals is almost universally globalised and seeps into all aspects of society and culture through the unrelenting force of mass media and the image.