Artist statement :

Land of Hope and Glory

23rd June 2016, the start of one of the biggest political divides in UK history. 51.9% of the UK voted to leave the EU.

With over 75% of the town’s population voting leave, Boston, Lincolnshire was branded ‘the most Pro-Brexit, and divided, town in the UK’. With immigration levels having risen to over 10.6% in Boston within the last 10 years.

‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is a project reacting to the current outcomes of Brexit and a nation divided by its idealisms. It takes a look into different areas of the UK with opposing arguments about the ‘perfect’ nation. An exploration of opinions through interviews and portraits, this project shines a non-bias view onto those affected by the decision to leave.

Mission Statement:

My aim was to photograph my home town of Boston and the people that lived there as well as documenting the change in the landscape since more EU citizens have moved there. The project was aimed to be a non-bias view of the town and the whole Brexit epidemic but also to show my audiences what is happening to the people of Boston and the leave and remain voters across the UK seeing as Brexit is so up in the air. 

Land of Hope and Glory is my final major project of university. Much like my artist statement says, it is based on the division caused by the 2016 referendum, Brexit. The initial idea came from being back in my home town, Boston which has been branded the most pro-Brexit town in the UK with over 75% of the population voting to leave the EU, but 10.6% of the population are from the new EU countries. This divide is only heightened by Brexit as proper ‘Bostonian’s’ speak about how they want the migrants to leave the town because they’re changing it too much. I have been photographing and interviewing different people throughout this project, including Bostonian’s, Eastern European’s, leave and remain voters in Boston and Bath, attending the London March for the People’s vote and interviewing MP’s on their differing views. 

This project has probably been one of my most challenging purely because I have had to learn a lot about politics and be quite ballsy in the way that I have had to come up with pretty hard questions for the MP’s as well as putting my own twist on the project to differ from the media. This is what I wanted to get away from within the project, I wanted to highlight the arguments of both sides without being bias. I have found that the media has played a vital part in what the public are thinking about Brexit as they have been constantly bias over the past three years. This project highlights both sides of the arguments and gives a voice to the people who would otherwise not have one. 

I have included a mixture of portraits and landscapes throughout this project as well as mixing black and white and colour, just like Chris Hoare and Tom Wood have in their previous projects. I finalised the project with a newspaper because I felt as though this was the best and most fitting publication for my project. I wanted the newspaper to be a metaphor for throw away words and opinions and to show the temporary hold that Brexit is having on our nation. I am really happy with the final outcome of my work and believe that it is probably one of my best projects to date purely because I know the amount of time and effort that I have put into the project and going back and forth to Boston, Bath and London. I really proud of the fact that I have created a newspaper from scratch as this is something that I had never done before. To achieve this, I had to work tirelessly on in-design, thinking about type face, layouts and my photographs in relation to the text that I had gathered. I wanted a publication that would suit my project and also play homage to the relationship between text and image of page as this was something that was really important for me to achieve, especially with all the interviews that I had been doing. 

I decided, for the physical prints of my project when showing them at my degree shows, that I wanted to show both sides of Brexit as well as the inclusion of Boston. With that, I decided to use Klaus, a German remain voter living in Bath and Mark, a leave voter living in Boston to be the faces of my project. As I have spoken about in a previous post, I had been experimenting with a lot of different materials to make the most of the two faces, but decided that I would print them on fabrics to represent two flags and two sides of Brexit. The portraits below are the ones that I have chosen to use and will be using to represent my project alongside my newspapers in the degree shows. 

Although I can’t attach my newspaper to show, I have screenshotted some of the pages from the PDF file that I sent off to the Newspaper club. I went with a design that 1, gave the images room to breathe but 2, allowed us to focus on the text and give that a lot of free, white space so that my audience could take the time to read it. The first and last image so the cover of the newspaper. I decided to break up the title like this since seeing a magazine use their cover as a poster and being really intrigued by it. I felt as though this worked really effectively when I got the newspaper back and was really happy with the way that I had designed it. 

Overall, I feel really proud of the publication and how far I have come as a photographer and person throughout the project. I am really happy that this is the project that I am leaving university with and feel as though I would be happy to take it with me to portfolio interviews because it shows another skill that I have learnt. It has also made me seriously think about going into editorial and publication works because I enjoyed the process so much.