INITIAL IDEAS

In the first EPQ session we gathered ideas and tried to pin point a particular subject of interest that we could explore further whilst also making sure the question we chose appealed to us initially.

 As a textiles student I wanted my extended project to involve textiles and I knew that I wanted my outcome to be an art piece, taking a similar form as a painting or piece of fine art however much like a tapestry or wall hanging it was to be made entirely out of fabric and textures. I also wanted to include another A level, this narrowed it down to a project involving textiles and either History, English or Philosophy. I am most interested in philosophy so it only made sense to go down this route. Philosophy as an A level is split into two main studies; philosophy of religion and religious ethics. This gave me two ideas for my project question, one encompassing each area of philosophy.

First and decidedly my favourite idea was to do a project on so called 'ethical art'. I wanted to explore this further as my knowledge on ethics in art is very limited however I'm fascinated by how many artists, particularly contemporary artists, use the platform of art to demonstrate and even advertise their social concerns. When I started jotting down what my question could be I came up with; "How influential is ethical art on humanities moral issues and should more of us be 'campaigning for change' through the platform of art?"  In looking into this further, the only problem that arose is that ethics is an extensively broad topic and perhaps reducing the question to a particular part of ethics such as feminism, racial prejudice or war and peace may be better. What stands out to me in my philosophy course in particular however is not any of these it is in fact cultural ethics. The way artists view cultural change and how culture is often discriminated or misinterpreted and fighting this through art appears to contribute hugely to societal change. Therefore my second question idea stemmed from this and became; "How influential is 'ethical art' on cultural development and should more of us be 'campaigning for change' through the platform of art?" By doing this question I can then look into specific artists and why they have chosen to campaign through their artwork. I can then finish it off with my own piece of ethical art in the form of a tapestry or textile piece.

Another idea that I had involved the religious aspect of philosophy. The only way I believed I could incorporate religion in textiles in a way that would give me a large enough bulk of information to work with would be to look at how religion has influenced textiles in various traditions. For example looking into religious tapestries throughout global history. At first this was definitely my preferred subject area as religion is a huge field in philosophy that interests me greatly and always has. However with this came some starting research and honestly it was very hard to find any real information on religious textiles, perhaps because of the sparcity of medieval or ancient religious tapestries and the information that goes with them. This idea quickly dwindled into a very vague question that didn't have any basis for research.

Therefore, taking all of this into account, I have decided to go with an ethical approach to not just textiles but also art in general and the question; "How influential is 'ethical art' on cultural development and should more of us be 'campaigning for change' through the platform of art?"