Victoria Norcross
Artist Statement
This project aims to raise awareness of the menopause, through a feminist approach to human-centred and participatory design to illuminate the symptoms and experiences without censorship.
My design practice is concerned with the impact of social change and how design can influence behaviours to improve lives by addressing underrepresented issues, topics and people. Its core aim is to create work from a place of empathy that drives meaningful and thought-provoking messages. It achieves this by representing issues in unorthodox and unexpected ways to create memorable and authentic connections with audiences to motivate change.
Every woman’s experience of the menopause is different and I want to celebrate that differentiation to better help ourselves, our partners and the people around us in facing this challenge and making sense of it together.
In creating a visual language that represents and connotes that of both female liberation in the use of typefaces and colour with rhetorical text, the aims are to persuade and influence a call to action. To speak frankly about symptom experience.
The OH! brand mark and poster campaign, introduce and realise the mantra - ‘exclamation, proclamation & revelation’ about what’s really happening to women’s minds and bodies.
Inspired by an era of empowerment and an unapologetic resistance to patriarchal systems and taboos, the typeface and design styling hint back to women's liberation and flower power movements. Promoting freedom of speech and encouraging the female voice to be expressed and heard.
This project is all about capturing women’s authentic voice, telling it how it is - and ‘not beating around the bush’! The only way this could be truly authentic and meaningful, was to view the issues through an ethnographic lens and involve the women experiencing it, to create the posters and own them. Poster workshops, using bespoke letterpress, were the mechanism for exposing their voices and provided a vehicle to share their experiences in a collaborative, creative and engaging way!