Exercise 5: Image and Text
Find words that have been written or spoken by someone else. You can gather these words from a variety of means – interviews, journals, archives, eavesdropping. Your subject may be a friend, stranger, alive or dead. Select your
five favourite examples and create five images that do justice to the essence of those words.
You may choose to present your images with or without the original words. Either way, make sure that the images are working hard to tell a story. If you decide to include the words, ensure that they add to the meaning rather than
describing the image or shutting it down. Try to keep your image-and-text combinations consistent – perhaps they are all overheard conversations on a bus or all come from an old newspaper report. Keep them part of a story.
Consider different ways of presenting the words. Audio or video might lend itself well to this kind of work, or a projection of images using voice-over. Experiment.
I work for the NHS. On the 12th May 2021, it was National Nurses Day. On that day a seminar was held for nurses working locally in the Clinical Commissioning Group and Primary Care. They were asked to submit three words via an online app, describing what it meant to them to be a nurse. The more times the same word was entered, the bigger the word becomes in the cloud. Therefore, for this exercise I have picked the five largest (most popular) words to depict as images: Compassion, Caring, Empathy, Privileged and Kind.
Compassion
noun: compassion; plural noun: compassion
sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.
Caring
adjective: caring
displaying kindness and concern for others.
Empathy
noun: empathy
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Privileged
adjective: privileged
- having special rights, advantages, or immunities
- (of information) legally protected from being made public.
Kind
adjective: kind;
- having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature.
- a group of people or things having similar characteristics.
As these were just single words, I decided just to add the dictionary definition of the word, and add simple images focused on the idea of healing hands and how they can be used differently to represent the different ways nurses care for us. I don’t think you need to describe what is happening in each images to illicit the essence of the word.
I used both my own hand and that of my husband, in opposite roles, giving and receiving the care. This was to guard against one gender being seen as the care giver. If I had access to more people, I think I would have chosen to use a range of different hands, in order to offer an insight into the rich diversity of nurses in this country.
