Aya Labib
Fashion graduate, graphic designer and illustrator.
My commission is a series of four illustrations all centred around different elements of diversity.
Whilst brain storming and researching, I came across numerous successful authors who have combined their literary skills, passion and sometimes life experiences to form foundations to create their own story. Each illustration relates to a specific book and each print will try and accentuate a new version of the front cover. I want to promote these literary works to all readers through the world of art.
Being half English, half Egyptian and growing up in the Middle East for fourteen years truly allowed me to experience a palette of cultures, religions, traditions and opinions.
I chose this category as diversity within literature goes way beyond ethnicity. Diversity includes the various facets of sexuality, gender, race, religion, cultural and societal groups. Whether characters in the books we read reflect others or ourselves, what is most important is connecting with them in ways that help us understand who we are today.
Diverse books are severely important due them educating people about others. These reads promote respect and empathy for all types of individuals. Literature has the power to encourage whilst at the same time enlighten other readers of the truths about situations they will never experience.
My first print is solely dedicated to ‘Between the world and me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The New York Times number one best seller is a thought provoking and emotional analysis of what it means to be a black person in America. Coates pulls many emotions and paints a poignant picture of how race can permeate so many facets of one’s life. I illustrated this print via Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator of two cliffs (and more detailing) to emphasise the hardships and struggles of how it must feel being surrounded by so much segregation and high amount of racism within the twenty first century.
‘No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement’ by Joseph P. Shapiro is my next illustration. This is a good resource to aid readers’ better understanding of experiences of those who are differently-abled. This book is timeless and relevant, particularly in this day and age when a huge portion of the working population experiences physical or mental impairments. To replicate this, I created an illustration of a variety of signs revealing physical and mental attributes with the connecting strings to emphasise how individuals could have a combination of disabilities rather than just one.
Questions of sexuality and gender are in the forefront of public discourse. ‘The Sexual Spectrum: Exploring Human Diversity’ by Olive Skene Johnson explores circumstance when it comes to same sex-marriages and gay/lesbian parenting. For this book cover, I drew an abstract piece where it involves shapes of colour to form a pattern but also two gender neutral bodies together.
The final print of the series was hand drawn then edited via Adobe suite. This simple print is based around culture replicated by overlapping circles and a pair of hands surrounding them to relate to Julian Baggini’s ‘How the World Thinks: a Global History of Philosophy’. The author interviews thinkers from across the globe and offers deep insights into how different regions operate.