Window to the Locker Rooms (3rd Year) 2018
During part one of my design domain, my group and I studied the film ‘High Rise’ and how it portrays the different themes of the gender within the interior. As this aligned so well with our chosen route, gender, this led to part two of my design domain being partly influenced by part one. Within our book, each member of my group chose different specific stills from the film that we felt aligned with our themes. In my case, I chose the themes masculinity, femininity and androgyny. After choosing our stills, we edited them in order to find the outline of that scene and carefully selected a colour which we wanted to highlight within the still. We further intensified the colour with paint in order to make our chosen theme stand out. After some consideration, I felt that for part two, the chosen theme was a bit too broad leading me to narrow down the focus. I decided to specifically focus on Masculinity and the interaction between interior design and male changing rooms, also known as locker rooms. In order to explore this theme more, I began studying different films, television shows, adverts and several other media sources to evaluate scenes where the male body is sexualised and fetishised within a locker room environment. In addition, I also analysed how despite the locker room being perceived as a very homoerotic and masculine place, the locker room tends to be associated with homophobic tendencies. For my final piece, I have embodied the various scenes within movies, television shows and other media I analysed to create an embroidery piece illustrating different male bodies within the locker room. This piece represents the voyeuristic gaze into the male body within locker room spaces. I felt fascinated by locker room’s interior spaces, which is a location where I feel that the male body is sexualised in today’s media. One subject I wanted to highlight within this piece is the manner in which homoeroticism and homophobia goes hand in hand in this particular area. Through various films, TV shows and adverts, I sourced different scenes showing male locker rooms and highlighted the bodies through this series. The process of embroidery was a deliberate choice, wanting to represent the delicate topic of men being sexualised and homophobia. The background of the board is deliberately harsh to represent secrets behind closed doors, relating to homophobia.