Instagram: @illustrationbyamanda
Responding to:
One Hundred Years Hence – Submarine Excursions (1899)
The Daily Mirror – The Future of Advertisement 28th April, (1909)
‘The Leading Operator of Submarine Tours, Subsidiary of Chimeric Productions Ltd’
pencil, digital collage, fabric printing on silk, silk ribbon, threads in cotton and polyester, wool blend fabric, buttons, appliquéd fabric and trims, embroidery, watercolour paint, hand lettering, mounted on an 8” wooden embroidery hoop.
A textile based response to both the inane advertising depicted in ‘The Future of Advertisement’ comic strip from The Daily Mirror and the notion of underwater tourism represented in the illustration ‘One Hundred Years Hence – Submarine Excursions’.
Offering a porthole view, the piece is mainly constructed from lightweight silk, alluding to the fragility and flimsiness of foresight, and the futility at which stitching into this delicate fabric intimates. The fine weave responds with ladders and holes as the needle punctures it.
The piece is layered with temporal multiplicities, from c.1900 imagery, 1950s advertising and the indexical trace of modernism with a commentary of litter and our destruction of the environment, combining in a dialogue that alludes to the passing of time.
Where idyllic cruises of underwater realms were once imagined, the bombardment of advertising we face cannot even be escaped below sea level, as the crude satire of the comic strip epitomises. Further inspection exposes the ludicrous irony in which we are marketed to. The underwater placement of adverts for water, fish drinking sprite and a surfing holiday perpetuate the marketing focus on consumerism.
A humiliating juxtaposition of the animals and objects are highlighted in embroidery. The perplexed reaction of the sea creatures offers a judicious appraisal of our societal constructs, with their guilelessness offering a paradigm of constancy in the world of fast paced and incredulous change around them.