 For this project I was matched up with a guide dog Victoria client called Rory Douglas and I met with him a couple of times before I started my work and I found just meeting him really really inspiring and over time that I spent with him I was able to observe how he lived worked with his guide dog Gideon and and the positive impact that Gideon had on his life. When you talk to someone who's got who's got a dog that you know they bond with so much and it's not just the day to day it's it opens doors for them you know to a lot of things they either couldn't do before I've never been able to do before and so Caroline just you know went on and on about how much freedom it had given her and so I guess that's sort of where what inspired my artwork is it's sort of built of two patterns one that incorporates that sort of technical know-how of the dogs sort of making in their way through the world and then the other patterns incorporate sort of what that meant for Kayleigh and Caroline. We came together and we were told that we were going to do something like this so quite excited but no one knew what we were going to do for the dog so then we came up with all of these ideas we had splattering we had the landscape which we're doing now. We had wings we're going to mount three wings on the back of it some of them we had to cut down a little bit because they weren't very realistic. We chose to paint landscapes on our dog and we thought being blind it doesn't really hinder you you can still do everything that a person would like could do. You can go anywhere and I guess that's where the idea of landscapes came from you can go anywhere do anything. I'm an artist that looks at ruptures in the suburban dream I thought this idea would be perfect working with a guide dog because for me they're a really nostalgic and iconic image that's always been there since I was a very young kid and I kind of left the nose all kind of like dirty still because I kind of imagine that so it's built up of hundreds of kids slobber and stuff you know plus the guide dog you know kind of gives people access to the suburbs and there's references to roads and images of suburbia throughout what I've done. Well with our artwork we've based it off a previous carry parent named Peter who he has a guide dog but he still enjoys the outdoors and going hiking and he's completed one of the Oxfam walks so we kind of based it off his love for nature so that's kind of how like all the wood chips and the leaves came in. Well I named the dog His Princess because I choose it because it's a nice name and I love to name that. I don't read, write and then I'm originally designed and then I've done the bed for the back side and I'm so happy that I've done it. Initially I've gone with the idea of a bird and that sense of freedom that the guide dogs provide and from there I developed it further into sort of an owl and that sense of wisdom that they're able to provide. Our topic in art was freedom so all the pictures we put on there were freedom kind of like the bugs, eagles which fly have wings and some of them were birds coming out of a cage. It's like a miracle for people to have a dog and to hoes and walk around with because they're blind and it's like a miracle for them to have it. I knew that they help people who are blind and that you're not supposed to touch them or give them a pat when they're doing it and they can get taught really well. I think working with like the dog it just really helped us understand like exactly what like they have to go through and the difficulties so we tried to like bring that out in the dog so that's why we have like textures on him and yeah it's really helped us realize like from their point of view where how they see Melbourne especially and the rest of the world. It's like some people if they saw someone with a guide dog there would go oh they're blind they can't see they're like missing out on this part of life but it's not really true in a way because they can still get out they can still enjoy everyday life they just can't see what's going on around them but they can still feel it and everything.