The Unfortunate Life of Mary

  • Kim Diamond
Another project looking at how the pragmatic imagery found in instruction manuals can be altered to garner different readings and interpretations, simply by rotating and moving elements. These images were part of a five-book project that explored the particularly unfortunate life of a young girl called Mary. All the imagery used could originally be found on a single page of a 1942 British Red Cross 'Hygiene and Sanitation' manual. The images are part of a collection of 20, and as well as illustrating the teenage years of Mary, they are also an exploration into how a relatively minor addition to an image, can significantly alter the way it is read and interpreted. The first image of the series had a single 'D' shape added to Mary's face, and I then added an additional 'D' shape to her face on each page, until I reached 20 'D' shapes, with each additional 'D' shape creating a different reading.