Revolutions lead to history. I studied the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the resulting Civil War, and one thing became clear to me about this historic event. There are libraries full of information about the most important people, the Lenin’s, Tsars and more, but as we descend below the most important figures, the bulk of the revolutionaries are hidden below a cloud of anonymity. In this piece, I tried to show how only the most important people in a revolution are remembered by the masses, with the unwaxed royals symbolizing the most important people, whilst the waxed cards symbolize the masses, and those people that time has forgotten, such as Grand Duke Mikhail who was to be the Tsar’s successor. Facts are blurred, history is distorted, but one thing is for sure, many people took part in the revolutions of the masses that are not remembered for their crucial roles.

Hard drives are some of the most important things in our lives. All over the world, hard drives store our personal information, and on these spinning disks resides much of what we are. The average teenager spends around eighteen hours per week on computers, whether it be on Facebook, games or homework, and almost all of what they do is stored in some form on hard drives. I thus decided to explore the way that hard drives form a crucial aspect of over ten percent of our lives by exposing them. I did this by disassembling individual drives and locking the parts in blocks of resin, sealing them in blocks of clear plastic. The results are transparent blocks of resin showing the individual parts of the devices that are crucial for our lives, unless the curing process goes wrong, at which point they turn into flaming, cracking, water-boiling blocks of high-explosive almost setting fire to the building.

Superheroes. Have you ever noticed how both superheroes and supervillains always have something wrong with them? It’s intentional. Whether it’s psychotic, drug-dependent, depressed Batman or The Hulk, the living embodiment of schizophrenia, artists build mental illness into many of their characters in an attempt to make them that much more enticing, or alternatively repulsive. Whilst these stereotypical mental illnesses are often below the skin, they are almost always present, so I decided to highlight these mental illnesses on posters for the films that these fictional characters play starring roles in. Using pins, biros and Photoshop I ‘scarred’ A3 sized posters with mental illnesses, attempting to highlight the perceived instability of the characters that are featured. The list of perceived mental illnesses for some superheroes is disturbingly long, with many of the original comic artists using politically incorrect stereotypes to achieve their goals, and it’s quite revealing to see the full list that the superheroes seem to have.