There are a variety of mediums through which an individual's identity can be expressed and portrayed.  Identity is certainly not limited to classic portraiture and Grayson Perry  exemplifies this fact with extreme precision.

This video clip can be used on its own in isolation from the other sources and still demonstrate the many, many layers of our personality and more importantly we as artists can choose which elements of our identiy to share with our audience and indeed how we want to do this; be it traditional portraiture or something more creative. 

 

Children in Key Stage 2 are often quite apprehensive about making self portraits and consider it to be quite challenging.  The teacher should highlight that one of the key points of this video is that a self portrait does not necessarily have to be a painting of a face.  Portraits can take any shape or form and children can include any aspect of thier identity they like.  Often sharing children's work as possible examples can be useful in helping children get started and for this reason i have included an identity collage made by a child. 

This source aims to encourage children to really think about identity and portraiture in a new way. 

 

Key Questions:

1. How has Grayson Perry changed your ideas about portraying identity?

2. What is identity? Has you understanding of identity changed from the beginning of this project and now? How has it changed?

3. What does Ali's collage tell us about his identity? How do we know this?

4. What aspects of your identity would you like to include in your collage? How will you show this?

 

Art Skills: cutting, sticking, layering, overlapping, composing, foreground, background, tone, texture, painting,

 

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oym9gw_u_L8

Collage by Muhammad Ali