Task: Creative Passport

The task is pretty open to interpretation - create a passport that expresses your creative identity. Could it be a free drawing activity? Perhaps you could do a comic? Or take the reader on some other narrative journey?

My natural instinct was to transform the pages in some other way, not least to avoid unleashing my terrible handwriting. So, where to start? With what most people might think when asked of 'the self', their own face.

I drew the outline of my face, then moved to cut it out. Then, through the new hole, I cut a smaller, more abstract shape, in order to create a layered tunnel - this would also create a sense of distance and therefore the sense of taking a literal journey.

In each double spread, I visually represented a new layer of my psyche. These layers consisted of imagery including fish, dragonflies, geometric curves and masks, all with a smaller and smaller hole in the page until finally what started as a face has become an eye. 

The female at the end of the book can be taken to represent the realest, most private self. Her hair spills on to and across a series of ripped pages, which increase in size until the back cover is finally reached.

Added as an afterthought, one of these pages is not only shorter than the one on top (and therefore hidden to the casual viewer) but bit is coloured the same deep blue as the opening spread. This was to express the idea that although you might know someone to the extent you can, even then you will be surprised by something! Indeed, perhaps there simply is no knowing, after all, people are in constant flux in both personality and experience as time progresses.

The most important feature is the tunnel and how the reader can interact with it. When you look at the cover you may make a judgement of the contents, however you have no way of knowing for sure. Then, you look through the face and you see that there is a more and more - humans are complex beings with sophisticated levels of emotion and experience. Then after a while you reach the final level. The key part of the inner face however, is the fact that when I am looking out I do not see myself, just like when the reader looks out through the tunnel of the book they cannot see any of the previous pages.

I feel that in my passport I adequately communicated the many layers and questions to the self, how we perceive it, and lastly, how others might perceive me.