Abstract Narrative for Orlando Rough

I have broken down the Orlando poem into a set of narrative pieces and have created a unique design for each piece. Each piece represents a certain point within the poem and I have used Colour and Pattern as a means of translating the text into an image. The introduction of new colours or the reintroduction of previously used colours throughout the narrative are a means of story telling without being overtly obvious and straight-forward with it. Common shapes within the narrative are circles, spirals and straight lines, the most prominent one is the circle – the reason for that being me wanting to provide the piece with a pulse, make it more lively. I feel as though despite the incident that the poem is based on involving a lot of death, it is important to showcase that in the end – the memory of the victims lives on and the LGBTQ+ community is livelier than ever before. The spirals are meant to represent the chaos, fear and state of confusion that dawned upon the people that were present in the shooting and its presence throughout the entire piece. It even past the point where Andrea has stopped talking about the shooting itself is meant to represent the fear that festered and lingered even long after the events of the night. It also plays into the idea of “never-ending cycle of abuse and discrimination”. The straight lines are meant to represent normality and how the survivors had to deal with the trauma while also not letting it affect how they live their lives as queer individuals. In a lot of the interviews and posts I’ve seen of the survivors’ perspectives and tellings of the story, the point of having to resume living as if nothing had happened, regardless of how difficult it might be was brought up more often than it was not. In the areas that the lines connect to make a checkered pattern represents the coliding fates of the victims and survivors and how they must stick together if they want to feel normal again.

Colour meanings:

I mainly based the definitions of colours off of the original pride flag but some of the colours I chose to expand upon to give them more context and definition than they initially had. To contextualize colours even further, I decided to apply the complimentary/opposite colour theory and how the definitions could garner a double meaning, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

The original and slightly altered meanings:

Red – Love and life
Orange – Healing
Yellow – Sunshine, but I decided to switch out that definition for happiness and overall positivity.
Green – Nature, but I decided to switch it out for the natural progression of processing emotions.
Blue – Serenity
Violet – Spirit, soul

The anti-meanings (or the opposites):

Red – the opposite of green – the struggles, the irks in the process of processing the trauma. Hardships.
Orange – the opposite of blue – disturbance of peace, whether they may be internal or external.
Yellow – the opposite of violet – the state of feeling crushed, numb and dissociative. Losing sense of self.
Green – the opposite of red – fear of love and life, grief, guilt of feeling alright.
Blue – the opposite of orange – emotional exhaustion that comes with healing, the desire for everything to end, hopelessness.
Violet – opposite of yellow – dread, fear, emotional turmoil.

Something that I would like to develop furter is my colour language. I feel like using the same shades for either meaning would make it much more difficult to read than it should be. I think playing around with brightness and saturation of the colours would help differentiate the tones of the narrative as it unfolds.