The sensitive topic of childhood and adulthood

For our theory class we have to curate an exhibition and we can choose the theme. For some people it was difficult to think of a theme, but I knew straight away that I wanted to do something with children. Artist, who's subject is children have been some of my favourites and using children myself as a topic in my art has always been something I have wanted to do.

So I started off with an artist I had seen in the guardian magazine ages ago and I had kept the images but had forgotten her name. I managed to find her. She is called Frieke Janssens and the series was called smoking kids.

This girl looks a lot like my little cousin

The kids were given fake cigarettes and then the smoke was edited in later. The idea of a child smoking is so scary, firstly because it is an adult thing and secondly because smoking is bad for you and we have to protect children.

I then typed artist who use children as a subject and I found Jonathan Hobin, who is a canadian artist and shocked a lot of people with his photography series 'In the Playroom'. The first thing I found was an article on whether it was responsible of the parents to let their children be part of it.

The boys knew exactly that they were recreating 9/11

Having the children reenact famous disaster is radicle but only because the older generation believe that we should not exposed children to this and that children are to naive to know what they are doing. But Hobin proved that a lot of the children did know what they were doing. Anyway children play games where they kill each other all the time.

There was a link to Anna Skladmann's (again) photography series called Little Adults. 

The photographs are of the children of the new super rich. These are children who are like little adults because their parents give them everything, because when the parents were young they had nothing. They children are extremely powerful and could probably order your death, which is a scary idea. 

I wanted to add old really old portraits of children because they all look like little adults, because the idea of childhood did not exist. 

At the weekend I also thought of Diane Arbus, who famously photographed 'Child with Toy Hand Grenade.' I had seen this picture in Berlin a couple of years ago and it seems to fit my subject well.

3D, it's a family thing.

3D works for me because I like making things big. Sculptures attract a lot of attention. When they are outside they can be as big as you like and they are often permanent, like the statue of liberty or the angel of the north. You can walk round sculptures and touch them, if you are allowed to or you are rebel in an art gallery. For people who are not completely obsessed with art, sculpture and statues are easy for them to access and understand. The Yorkshire sculpture park is a good example of this. People go there with their family to see art, but their kids can just climb all over the sculptures and then they take nice pictures of their children for the family album. If they do not like the sculpture they move on. If they were in an art gallery with paintings or photography, they would be bored out of their mind. 3D is just more relatable to the mainstream because they live in a 3D world. If they cannot see the deep and meaningful point of the sculpture they can see it as a chair or a bed. Kids are especially good at this, which is why 3D is a family thing.