Men aged 25 and 34 sought for art project

Published On Tue 13 Oct 2015 by Grant Hill

A Fine Art student from the University of Dundee is appealing for 25 and 34-year-old men to take part in a project helping her to deal with the death of her brother nine years ago.

Mhari Davidson’s younger brother Shaun was only 25 when he died in 2006. She is looking for nine men of the same age as Shaun was when he died and another nine the same age as he would be now to pose for photographs as part of her work examining the changes that people undergo during that nine-year period and wondering what her brother would have been like now.

Mhari, a Year 3 student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, said she has long wanted to create work as a way with dealing with her feelings relating to Shaun’s death.

“Before I came to university I touched upon Shaun’s death a little in some of the work I was doing at college but I didn’t resolve anything through it and I couldn’t do the type of work I wanted until now,” she said.

“My tutor suggested different ways of working that help me to address the absence that Shaun’s death has left in our lives and the feelings we still need to deal with. One of those is the wondering what he would be like now, and that’s why I want to picture 25 and 34-year-old men to capture how people change in that time.

“A lot of our 20s are taken up trying to find our way in life and making mistakes but as we get older we need to grow up and learn from them as we try to make our mark on the world. I wonder how Shaun would have reacted to that and what growing up would have meant to him.”

Mhari, from Arbroath, says he would only take up a few minutes of the volunteers’ time to photograph them and have a brief chat about their lives. She would also like to hear from males and females with old passport photos that can feature as part of the wider project about growing up.

Anyone interested in helping Mhari can contact her on m.davidson@dundee.ac.uk.

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