The last week I have been set back in my timeline by a significant amount, mainly focussing on gallery visits, this is disappointing but means that I have to work quickly to meet my deadlines in the future. I feel this is going to be a major challenge for me to work as efficiently as possible over the next couple of weeks.
To begin my sketchbook, I started to get a full understanding of my subject by researching what Stockholm Syndrome means. I did this by researching medical journals, past cases and the factors which contribute to the survival strategy. I found the idea of how the brain reacts unconsciously as a survival mechanism when in the body is in extreme cases of shock and terror. I also researched as many public cases of the syndrome as possible to create a complete idea of what the syndrome entails. For primary research, I conducted interviews discussing what Stockholm Syndrome meant to my subjects and the connotations surrounding the idea of captivity. An interesting point that came up was that captivity is heavily linked to the captivity of animals in zoo's, I liked this point as I wouldn't have thought of it without the help of these interviews and would like to research in-depth this topic further into my project.
From this initial research, I decided to layout the theme of Stockholm Syndrome in three chapters; captivity, divine intervention and carnal knowledge. This researching allowed me to see paths that weren't apparent to begin with and feel this helped me create interesting 'chapters' that left a lot of room for development and experiments. I think that setting my project out in chapters will help focus each idea and create a narrative within my sketchbook and final piece.
Starting off with my chapter of captivity, I again made another brainstorm helping me map out what I would explore in this chapter, I started off looking again at the first case of Stockholm Syndrome, a bank robbery in Sweden in the 70's, to see if I could develop any points from the origin of this reaction. I particularly found the line from one of the victims, "But Sven, it's only in the leg", when talking about how she thought this as an act of kindness by her captor when he said he would have to shoot one of the captives. I also research the case of Ariel Castro, where he kept 3 women locked in his house for 10 years, the point I thought I could develop into a prop was the motorbike helmet that Castro used to muffle the screams of the women when he raped them. Even though both these points are morbid, I want to create a niche prop to use within a shoot that won't obviously represent my title. Through collage, I developed an idea of creating a helmet with feet surrounding it which I feel is an interesting niche prop that would meet my customer's needs.
