No Evil was a part of my exploration of my IGCSE topic in year 11. At the beginning of the year, each of us was given a letter of the alphabet to explore- mine being the letter 'e'. I started off with a brainstorm, which led me to a great number of conceptual words, with the word 'evil' being the one which stuck out to me the most. 'Embroidery', which was the only non-abstract word in my brainstorm, seemed like a good place to start, in terms of experimenting. I'd taught myself how to sew when I was a bit younger, but before this project, I'd never really worked extensively with needle and thread. I researched a number of artists and was really struck by the minimalistic style of them of them. One large preconception of embroidery which I had always believed before this project was that embroidery was always quite complicated and involved a lot of intricate patterns. After looking at the work of some modern embroidery artists, I had quickly learnt that this was not true, and was inspired by how these artists took an age-old practice and turned it into a piece of modern, almost minimalistic piece of artwork. 

 

Returning back to the concept of 'evil', after some consideration, I wanted to explore the three no-evil monkeys. The three monkeys present the idea of evil being an entity which can be seen, heard and done. I had come to my own personal conclusion that the three points of evil, while justifiable, often don't exist independently in real life. Rather, the points of evil work in tandem with each other, with one act seen resulting in another act done, so that a cyclical pattern of evil is formed. I wanted to show the interlinking nature of this within my embroidered piece of work. 

 

I took a few photos of my friend Nav doing the 3 no evil poses, then edited the photos out. I then discovered the option on an online photo editor to give the photos and anaglyphic effect. I quite liked the effects that this had, and decided to continue looking at it, in particular, the three colours the image was split into. I thought that the three colours embodied my conceptual thinking quite well, as it showed different components split from a single image, such as how the points of evil are split from the single entity itself. While each can exist on its own, they often overlap to create a more defined and impactful image. 

 

This then brought me into the creation of my final piece, which was an embroidered image of the 3 different no-evil poses, each one of the anaglyph colours, overlapping. I chose to use minimalistic outlines of the figures, as I believed that this would make the overlapping sections more defined. 

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