The Mentor

  The Tribe project continues! I'm really enjoying compiling inspirations for this project. The initial idea came from my interest in indigenous people's textiles and this amazing documentary I watched called American Nomads, which you can watch here. The documentary centres on lone travellers who gave up commercially driven lives or ran away from their families for a life on the american road. I've always been fascinated by the traditional nomad. The original explorers and people like Bruce Chatwin, who walked across Patagonia in the 1970s and wrote about the cowboys, dinosaur fossils and general bandits he met. In the documentary I was particularly taken with a kind of subculture of kids who hitch hike an hop freight trains called "Gutterpunks". I want the tribe to be a kind of futuristic representation of the gutterpunks. 

  

   Gutterpunks differ from general homeless people often in that they are voluntarily homeless, it seems this is their form of "anarchy" (hence the name "punk" being attached to them). I want the tribe to be a kind of childlike space age set of gutterpunks who have come together and made their own new religion and society. My knowledge is limited in how tribes initially form their societies and belief systems so currently I am just picking apart and choosing bits of what I learn about different tribes (on a mostly aesthetic level) to incorporate into the project. This piece is called The Mentor. When I started it I was thinking of the young gutterpunks who feel compelled to leave and how frightening it must be. It's been a while since I watched American Nomads but I think there's a part where one teenager gets separated from his group and I could only imagine how frightening that must be as jumping freight trains is a very risky business. I'm not sure what happened to this kid here, but he has someone to help him through it.

 xx