The feeling they convey is one of nature pushed back unceremoniously but incompletely of freeways and cul-de-sacs freshly bulldozed from a bush that “rolled and twisted like an unmade bed”. Now more urban but then very much on the city’s periphery, Hillarys supplies the atmosphere that pervades two of Tan’s more recent books, Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) and Rules of Summer (2013). gives more weight to living in Hillarys, a far-flung coastal suburb of Perth - “not quite as bland as the pastel suburbia of Edward Scissorhands but not too far from it either”. Which suburbs influenced Shaun Tan? Well, Tan grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. It is one artist’s impression of what suburban life feels like. Is this someone’s back yard or a shared space? No matter. This would be tagged ‘countryside’ or ‘rural’.
Look up ‘suburbs’ on any Stock photo site and you won’t find images such as this. This isn’t anything like the suburbs where I grew up, and where I live now, with houses packed in tightly together to save a little on sprawl. Cars have changed the meaning and experience of suburbia, as people no longer tend to live their lives there, travelling to and from a nearby city, or to another suburb, for work, and for a chance at ‘better’ schooling. Much of the humour will be lost on a modern audience (or on me, at least) and suburbia of the 1920s looked quite different from today’s suburbia, more akin to a rural village, where everybody knows everybody. This short book of captioned caricatures and cartoons appeared in 1922. This short YouTube video should be enough to get students started. These can be used as a base for creating realworld artworks, or as prompts for their own stories.
#LOOP HERO SUBURBS GENERATOR#
#LOOP HERO SUBURBS HOW TO#
Find something around your house which is old or dilapidated or broken and make a still life sketch of it a la “Broken Toys”.Using “The Water Buffalo” as mentor text, students write a story about a wild creature they find somewhere in their house, yard or street.Creative Arts teachers find this really useful in the classroom because these images can ostensibly work as story starters, though I do wonder if students might experience the same awe as I do when confronted with these pieces, unable to come up with anything at all! CREATIVE LEARNING IDEAS: ART OF YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD Some of the stories have no words, and might consist only of a single frame of narrative art. ( I’ve previously written about Eric here.) The common thread between stories in this compendium: All stories are set in the same, off-kilter suburb. Eric, which exists as a miniature stand-alone book. Tales From Outer Suburbia is a collection of various stories. If The Lost Thing makes you question, The Red Tree make you feel, and The Arrival make you empathize, then Tales from Outer Suburbia should make you think.
Surely not! If I’m reluctant to delve into Tan’s work, that’s probably because whatever I say, it doesn’t make a dent in all that can be said. An Interview with Naomi Rourke by Scott Summers
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