AFTER THE WORLD HAS ENDED, THE BEGINNING

I can remember the day when I first realised that my collection would explore the idea of a post-apocalyptic realm and it came in the form of an instant lightening bolt moment. I was reading the series 'The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins on the beach on my Summer Holiday and was immediately intrigued by the book, for the first time in a long time I was captivated. In many instances the futuristic post-apocalyptic stuff my mum read would never have interested me and yet this series was infectious and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why? Then it came to me….Katniss was a strong, independent woman who had become savage due to her circumstances, an image of women we are not used to reading about. What were her circumstances and why did I find it so interesting? It is a future world and yet so incredibly primitive in nature. With all the technology it possessed it was socially and culturally behind. This made me think about this idea that our world as we know it would never be as it was when it finally came to end, we would lose more then the physical elements of our world…we would lose our morals, our humanity. My fascination grew and grew until eventually I had read every post-apocalyptic book and watched every movie I could get my hands on until I felt satisfied that I could completely understand the genre. And it was final…I had fallen in love with intensity of this immediate post-apocalyptic world- decayed, chaotic, destroyed, savage, desolate and all the visual representations that came with the genre. My obsession continued and still does.