How art can get the message across

Art student Sara Darr was inspired to use her skills to illustrate the importance of the Millennium Development Goals.

Goal one: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Goal two: achieve universal primary education. Goal four: reduce child mortality. Goal seven: ensure environmental sustainability.

In the summer of 2005, I was lucky enough to attend the third World Youth Congress in Stirling, which focused on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These are globally recognised targets in the areas of world poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and global partnerships.

After the Congress, I felt energised and motivated to inform and educate my community about the MDGs. I discovered that a lot of my friends had either not heard of the goals or were just disinterested in politics in general. So, earlier this year, I chose to incorporate the theme of the MDGs into the final project of my art and design foundation course.

I am really surprised that here we are in 2006 - six years into the timeframe for the MDGs - and the majority of the public hasn't even heard of them! Despite this, I don't think it's something to get angry about, or just sit back and think, "Well, I know about it and I don't care that no-one else does".

As an artist who has a passion for politics, I feel that it's my duty to inform and educate people about global issues. So I decided that my aim was to raise awareness of the MDGs through art in a simple but visually interesting way.

After visiting the Africa Remix exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2005, I knew that I wanted to use African Dutch wax print fabric as it is rich in colour, vibrant and eye-catching. However, I was unsure how to illustrate the MDGs in a way that wasn't too complex for people to understand, so I decided to keep it simple and straightforward.

I chose to use images from the United Nations MDG website as it illustrated each of the goals clearly. I decided to highlight the key word of each goal by copying it onto acetate, whilst adding colour by using the fabric as the background.

For my final piece, I produced a series of frames which displayed the eight goals in a simplistic but vibrant way. I produced a series of cardboard structures which were linked to the frames but were a little more informative as I highlighted the goal, its target and included an image.

Overall I felt that my project achieved its main aim of raising the awareness of the MDGs. I received positive feedback from the people who viewed it which was pleasing for me as a young political artist. I was also delighted that a few of my friends became genuinely interested in finding out more about the goals and the MDGs campaign!