Second year Lian Robinson shoots work for the music brief in the Editorial and Moving Image module
5th January 2022
I knew immediately upon reading the brief that I would be tailoring my work to the indie-rock band Nothing But Thieves- there are few other artists that I listen to! The band often question religion in their songs, a concept that I have a complicated relationship with, being LGBTQ+ but from a Catholic school.
These lines from ‘I’m Not Made By Design’ stuck with me the most:
“Your Goddess is bathed in gold while keeping us in line; we’re killing each other for a woman in the sky.”
From this, I decided to have my model- whose pose mimics Eve’s in Karoly Patko’s depiction of The Fall- reaching for gold to represent society’s desperation to find their gods and reach their heaven. In my development process I experimented with painting on my images with gold ink, and this is seen in the closeup image of the hand, but for the larger piece I eventually settled on just gold text.
From researching Nothing But Thieves’ previous album covers, I figured that something more abstract would better suit them and so tried out chemograms for the first time. This is where you paint on the developer in the darkroom, giving the piece its splashes and dribbles. I then scanned these in and rotated the print to create the glitchy-mirror effect.
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