Kevin The Banana

The real-life story I based my children's book on:

The sequence starts with a banana duct taped to a wall. But it's not that simple. It's worth $120,000 and the wall it's stuck to is in Art Basel in Miami Beach, one of the three locations globally in the Art Basel chain which houses some of the world's most expensive modern art. The people who go there are looking to spend lots of money, and although it seems ridiculous, the art piece sold for $120,000. The artist, Maurizio Cattelan (who previously made mainstream news with a golden toilet, which was stolen from Blenheim Palace) named the piece 'Comedian'. This simple spectacle prompted a lot of debate and conversation, some arguing that it is self-aware of it's stupidity, hence the title, while others thought it was completely absurd to sell a piece of fruit for more than $100,000.

Personally, I think the whole thing is ridiculous, but interesting nonetheless. And the intrigue doesn't stop there. In my eyes, the real hero of the story is a man called David Datuna, a self-proclaimed performance artist who strode into the 'art fair' and waited patiently in the queue to see the infamous fruit. When it was his turn to see the banana, he confidently took it off the wall, started to peel it and ate it there and then. At a press conference, David said “I call the performance, ‘Hungry Artist,’ because I was hungry and I just ate it.” 




There has been so much news coverage of this chain of events, and the topic was a bit exhausted, but I wanted to tell the story from a different perspective. I thought it would be fun to write it from the banana's point of view. The story I wrote is fiction, but is still loosely based on the actual events. I personified the banana, gave it a face and called it Kevin.

I struggled with how I wanted the banana to look at first. I wasn't sure if I should give him legs, arms, ears or a nose. I wanted him to have a personality, but I was conscious of crossing the uncanny valley and making him look too human, which would be creepy. In the end, I decided to keep it simple and do the illustrations in a cartoon style with bright colours.

young people and the cycle of poverty

 

I got the inspiration for my book from a Banksy image of a small girl holding a balloon with the title “no hope“. I interpreted the image to represent children in poverty originally down to the imagery alone and after some research also by the location of the graffiti. It was created on a crumbling garden wall in Southampton and was painted over with white paint within a week of it being created. 

This art inspired me because of the powerful message it portrays, while still holding an air of simplicity also because I believe it to be a brilliant piece of artwork. I got the images inside my book from thinking of what would suit the pages content and either drawing that or researching the theme and looking at images related to it. 

 My book is different because it’s on a topic no one else wrote about, also because its written in the form of a spoken word piece / poetry.

 The theme I’m trying to express through my text and images is the cycle of poverty. How ridiculous and unjust it is that the amount of opportunities you get in life is based upon your parent's income, post code or your community's facilities. In my opinion all children should have the same opportunities in life.  

The reason I wrote this was to challenge the argument some make when talking about the cycle of poverty that anyone can go from “rags to riches”. I can see how that is an easy statement to make when you’ve been born into a nurturing stable environment. Although people are a lot less likely to make such a statement if they haven’t had the best facilities in life so far. For example if there secondary school didn’t offer a higher level Math's or Irish , they’ve had to take up job to help with bills which interfered with school studies, they’ve become homeless at a time and had nowhere to study without interference, or for a many multitude of reasons to do with one's economic status that effects education . 

My point is we do not have enough facilities for the youth of this country that’s living in poverty and we can not expect conditions to change until we fulfill those demands.