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What is Beauty?
The Oxford dictionary defines Beauty as: "A combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially sight."
The philosopher and teacher, Confucius said of beauty: "Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it."
The Exploration of Beauty -
Recycled Materials
The Oxford dictionary defines exploration as: "The action of exploring an unfamiliar area."
Recycling: "The action or process of converting waste into a reusable material."
It is through this idea of beauty and exploration that I want to experiment with the use of recycled materials found in my household and local neighbourhood. These materials would be used to create a zine that looked at beauty in the discarded, the unusual, the everyday objects that we see as trash and recycling.
A famous saying is "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This book questions the premise of this notion. Who will see the beauty in what I have created, will this open questions of what can be used to create beauty, encourage or inspire other artists to look at recycled materials as a medium for future art projects. These are all ideas or ideals that I wish to explore.
Culturally and historically zines have served as an outlet for content that is considered to be too risqué, non conformist and non mainstream for a commercial publication.
This zine also questions the notion that a zine needs to printed and be able to be mass produced. In a day an age of overconsumption, over materialisation this zine encourages users to interact and feel the three dimensional qualities of a palpable object that entices the senses. Its stands as an almost quiet protest to a saturated world of media and mass production of publications.
It brings to mind questions can this zine stand alone in a library or a public space where people can interact with it. Does it need to be mass produced. Can this zine in its protest save paper and send its message over the world wide wide. In someways it pays homage to the original zine makers who pushed a non conformist attitude towards what was seen to be the normalities of social practice at the time.