New Designers 08: graduate Stuart Bannocks of As Well As Design has created a range of accessories designed to test the UK's stringent anti-gun laws.
Responding to a law that forbids the manufacture of replica guns, and to news stories about people mistaking objects such as bananas as weapons, Bannocks has produced a series of tattoos, stickers and imitation gun sights that turn everyday objects into pretend firearms.
Bannocks, a graduate of Goldsmiths University in London, showed the range at the New Designers exhibition in London last month.
Bannocks also presented books containing drawings of guns completed in a few seconds and instruction sheets for evoking guns with hand gestures alone.
Here 's some text from Bannocks:
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Under the Violent Crime Reduction Act it has been illegal to manufacture or produce replica firearms in the UK since 2006. The law stipulates its own technicalities regarding imitation referring to direct and accurate replication. But given the current, sensitive climate of gun crime awareness, and past cases in which, everyday objects have been misconstrued as weapons at what point does this manufacture actually take place?
The pieces question at what point this “manufacture” takes place. They take already established concepts such making your hand into a gun shape or a banana as a gun, and add a layer onto that which affirms your or other’s understanding of the form you are creating.
The project started with a very crude look a replication, with direct re-forming of weapons, as the project progressed the pieces became simpler and less tangible until the point it simply becomes hand movements in an instruction format.
