Rationale

The subject I chose was LGBTQ+ discrimination. Although LGBTQ people have legal equality in most ways, there is still a lot of casual (and dangerous) homophobia and transphobia in our society. True equality would mean that there is none of this. I focused on the emotional damage that verbal discrimination and microagressions cause. My aim was to make people who say things like ‘that’s so gay’ realise that it can be very harmful.

I showed the emotional impact of this with scale and colour, by portraying these phrases as a dark mass of attacking magpies cornering or surrounding the small, vulnerable LGBTQ birds. I used birds to make it New Zealand specific, and because birds can represent freedom (when alone), but also a violent swarm en masse. I used traditional ink drawings of the birds and words to create a scratchy, aggressive feel. The black splatters on the version with negative space have connotations of graffiti, or even blood splatters, which can both be violent. Colour is also an important part of both designs – the only colour in each design is the birds, which are brightly coloured in Pride flag colours, and create the main focal point. The rest of the image is black and white, the harsh contrast is aggressive and antagonistic.

The headline “They’re just words” is a contradiction to the visual aspects of the poster, therefore it becomes another part of the discrimination – those who say that discriminatory language doesn’t cause any damage are just adding to it. The headline in the other poster is a more complimentary headline, which emphasises the effect that it has on LGBTQ people. These both, combined with the image of the small cute birds being attacked, appeal to the viewer’s emotional response (pathos), and the tagline on the second also adds a statistic about suicide as a logical means to persuade the viewer.

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