“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” [Restriction project - October 2009]

The most interesting part of group project was seeing the ideas of others when we presented our research. The selection process for the image, text and an image of text, was challenging as it was a subjective choice and certain images which mean one thing to one person could mean the opposite to another. Fortunately, we all had similar ideas which made formulating our final plans easier.
I was thrown off track when we switched images with another group, as I had already formed ideas for our own images. The new quote we had was by far our favourite and was open to much more interpretations as well as being a thought provoking phrase.

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”

We all felt this quote linked in with religion and belief. Religion includes many differing beliefs so tI felt we should not use imagery specific to any religioun. I liked how we focused on the ‘opened by wonder’ part of the quote and agreed it could be symbolic of a heavenly image. We decided it would be most appropriate to use a heavenly landscape, an image that can meet common grounds with everybody. The image we used for our group submission was a landscape of a man on a hill, and a huge open space full of clouds above the horizon where the text fit perfectly. It portrayed the opened by wonder part of the quote but we had become drawn away from the main word which was belief. After this project I went away and used one of my original images from searching for imagery that matched up with the quote. I used a very elaborate dream like font and really liked how it linked in with the style of illustration used in the image. This worked really well and my final image reflected wonder, belief and the prospect of being open minded.

We could have worked better as a group and experimented more with our outcome for the group review. The post-it note feedback comments reflected our lack of development. I think we would have come up with a more stunning piece had our attendance been greater and we had communicated more thoroughly.