Protest! Gingerism is real.

For one of our classes we were given the brief of "Protest", to come up with a 2D piece that was a rant about something we felt strongly about. For this I picked Gingerism. It is more of an issue than people realise and that it can have more of an effect on a person than society is willing to recognise.

My first idea for this project, even before I had decided on what my topic was going to be, was that I wanted to create a picket sign as that is an obvious sign of protest. It is almost iconic to be placed alongside the topic of protests. But to not pigeon-hold myself too early I thought about creating a painting or a design that could be placed onto simple canvas or into a frame, but it brought me full circle to, "why can't I put this onto a picket sign?", so that has become my final piece idea.

Different ideas I had had for the themes was the media and how they portray things like, women's "beauty" and how they photoshop every image and the effect this has specifically on young girls and their fashion nowadays. I also thought about how social media almost fuels homophobia and the hateful "anonymous" comments you get. I thought about politics and the ways in which it is failing this country in particular but I know too little about politics and politicians to be able to create a whole project. An issue that I looked into was that of waste, and how land is being wasted to create more housing, create landfills, and in general kill the land and the animals that live on it. However I decided I wanted to focus on gingerism as it is something I have experienced myself, my sister has experienced and some of my friends and family as well, so I would have loads of first hand accounts to listen to and to use to create something powerful.

My main point is just to make it more commonly known. Not many people think about how their small comment about someones hair colour can be offensive, or showing that some people deem having ginger hair as being a bad thing and a cause for further bullying. The goal I want to achieve is to make people think about some of the comments they say to people and maybe having this span deeper into other hair colour stereotypes and bullying in general.

While researching I have found a website dedicated to the accounts of gingers being bullied and attacked for simply being ginger. http://gingerism.com/ So far I have only read some accounts but they seem to mostly have extreme outcomes, or at least the ones at the top were, leading to convictions.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/227R6QV

This is my survey to get the public's idea of how big an issue gingerism is and to find out more from people I wouldn't get to talk to. I hope to get around 50 realistically but will stop a little after that if it happens.