WONDER : unveiling magic in the contemporary world

Abstract

What is wonder really? This is the question I am trying to begin to answer with this project. The possibility of carrying the Child’s eye throughout life is an intriguing and appealing idea. Sometimes daily life can become overwhelmingly monotonous if we do not look closer at our surroundings. The ability to see the same things which we see every day with the vision of a wide-eyed child is a skill which must be honed and is one which geniuses amongst romantic poets, fantasy authors, great artists and the like have been able to achieve themselves or impart upon their audience by forcing you to take on a journey of exploration within your mind, through the writer’s or artist’s adventure of their own. Through this skill achieved by promenades through our busy minds and introspective journeys into our deepest imagination, we can pull new colours and forms into our present, breathing new life into routine, making what we previously thought had grown bland and gray, beautiful. Life is but a journey of constant discovery, and with my works I will endeavor to express the yearning to see the world anew, and hopefully put a spark into all those who see it to embark upon their own journeys, so that hopefully they will leave with their eyes a pinch further open than before. The literature review will be exploring the view on wonder of several artists, poets, and authors. The research done in this section had to be chiseled down from a wide selection of references, to a few which spanned different opinions and opposing views, in order to avoid any bias. The relationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world becomes a major theme here and is explored in different contexts. The project section describes the practical part of this dissertation from beginning to end, from preliminary sketches, to abandoned idea, and lastly the final works. The findings section discusses what went well, and what went wrong, in addition to new ideas, and those left behind.