The last few days have been a really stressful, REALLY exciting time for me. I moved into dorms on Saturday and have been settling in quickly… that means meeting all my flatmates, locating and visiting the nearest Wetherspoons and generally staying alive and healthy in lieu of my mammy doing everything for me back home.

I’m here to talk about the art, though! After icebreakers, everybody settled into small groups and looked through our survival kits.

The first task was to draw “instructional” diagrams of your (or another) survival kit, communicating each item’s use without using any written language. Think IKEA construction booklets.

Then we were tasked with mixing up our kits as a small group and creating a new survival kit, which in the process of naming image files on the laptop I dubbed “frankensurvival”.

The idea was really to push the limits of our creativity and we had free reign to do what we wanted, pretty much. Said, Zaina, Martha, Jemima and I made a small Bob Ross shrine and a small pile of potential weapons to beat enemies with, illustrated on the common public enemy of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Below are images from today.

Overall, it was a fun day. Our final survival kit was easily one of the most comically inclined of all of those students made. Well over half of them were quite depressing, really. VERY heavy on the climate change and anti-political, environmentalist-dystopian views. I have to say there was one kit that made a point on having a positive, conscientious outlook on the future and was generally a very pretty kit; I hold respect for the group that created that amongst such an existential crowd.