Exercise 2.1
Going back to the letter I wrote in Part One.
My letter was never completed and left as work to go back to as I progressed through the course, I added more notes.
The route and how it deviated from the planned path
I cannot but refer to the death of my son as having a significant impact on my making and thinking – it changed many things in my life, especially around planning. I became more aware of raw feelings I either dealt with or tried to withhold. In many ways, care became an instinctive exploration within my making. I prefer to keep the different material explorations separate as they refer to fungi, feathers and nests, which to me, are connected, but gave me opportunities to research separately as objects around their symbolic meaning in my practice. It reminds me of my own life, where coherency has become chaos and how I try to make sense of and follow the path daily. I find that by starting to weave nests, I came to a place of quietness and rest. The nests became metaphors for safety and hiding and thinking how to rebuild – I feel somehow displaced in my own space and that the nests became a place to explore these feelings.
Considering what I have valued most within this course experience, it must be the freedom to work with many materials and explore work that could become site-specific and be placed outside the studio. I looked back at my first tutorial and feedback from my tutor at that stage, as linked to the Learning Outcomes:
- ..further develop your technical and practical skills to realise the ambitious body of work
- Extend your visual and research skills to identify a line of enquiry and produce a critically informed body of work
- use experimentation to extend your practice and to develop your visual language
A lot of time was spent on a WHY question, and one idea that stood with me was the need for my work to become a ‘sort of collaboration with the other’. I was pretty focused on marks and things left behind as things that connect the work with fungi. I was encouraged to consider how I could ‘inhabit the world of the non-human and if that would be in the form of a daily performance practice. I did not explore this idea then, but it has now become a possibility in my nest-making. Currently, I am photographing two nests hanging outside. I am intrigued that they are less fragile than I thought and that they somehow started to connect as they swayed in the wind and some of the loose raffia threads began to connect. (on 30 October, they have been outside for 5 days)
I am more aware of the material/material questions around my making where I ask questions such as How should I make sense of the push-pull between tangible surface and the immaterial – psychological, emotional, and memorial – that the ‘stuff’ of objects transmits/carries? I feel that materials came to me – I found them on my path during my studies, and that I should remain focussed on the WHY and HOW it influences me if I consider my growth and ambitions for my future work. Ideas around investigating materials by experimentation by looking if textures or combinations of materials can evoke specific emotional responses could be explored. I would say the mushroom installation, as it is decaying, gives a sense of history. Does it evoke emotions? Looking at my making nests and exploring the huge sociable weaver nests ask that I could use documenting and reflecting on my work to get to know and reflect, but I also recognise that I could look at the stories and histories of the materials in culture.
Look at material investigations, narrative inquiry of the material, the psychological impact – sensory, curation and presentation, cross-disciplinary exploration, documenting and archiving, philosophical inquiry, reflective practice, and community involvement.