Post Assessment Musing

Well, it's a pass.  The first half of the first year of my Fine Art degree has been cleared, no problems.  Biggest takeaway is that I need to find a theme.  

Which I have, but it's a fairly nebulous one, an idea of a feeling.  You cannot tell people how you're feeling and expect them to truly understand.  Your experiences are yours alone and no matter how hard or how well you explain them they remain a private experience that others may only guess at.  Similarly, you can never truly know what another is experiencing.  It is the way of things.

So, I need to bring theme to a form, that I can push and explore.  I think that is the angle I'm expected to push.  Which I can do.  That would be easy, but it would be boring.  It's there already, I form I have explored in paint, clay and an abortive attempt at solarprint.  (Thanks Covid, for curtailing that).  I have already made plans to integrate the clay and a separate wire sculpture.  I need to make more of the clay pieces, but they have taken so long to be fired (the first one was fun to make but so badly done that THREE MONTHS drying time wasn't enough for it to be fired safely) that it's make me wary of going back.  That and the sensual experience I had being something I'm very self conscious about...

    

I think that's a theme.

But can I commit to it?  That's the question.  I do tend to feel stifled when restricting to one thing, I kinda need to explode in all directions.  Well, I have a few weeks now to ponder my next step, and then a year to find a theme.

Mid Pandemic Flailings

Artistically, I'm flailing.  Not sure how to create what I want to create or even if I should.

Art, to me, now, should be a reflection of one's self, one's existence.  Hold a mirror to life, reflect it and shine it out anew, distorted and abstracted as though through a prism.  And that is what I strive for.

To me an artist isn't someone who just makes pretty pictures.  An artist is a creative, a thinker, a philosopher.  Driven and pushed by urges and instincts that they cannot explain.  This is my life, this is what I leave behind, this is my statement.

Big words, big ideas.  In an academic sense, something to be crept up on, snuck up and approached over three years with an eye to creating a shown work at the end of the year and a culmination at the end of the third years of Work.  

I haven't created for a few weeks now.  I want to but something stops me.  There is fear.  Fear of going too far, of being told I am wrong.  There are...  valid grounds for feeling this.  It has happened before, before I endured so many lost years and now...?  My mind is bubbling, spilling over with ideas to persue, frustrated at being denied access to studios and materials due to this pandemic.

i am encouraged to not do photography

My work is moving towards a darker impulse.  I feel that to create the work that makes me feel like I am creating validly I must push in a direction that will not be embraced by the safe world of university.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.  Hedonism and self destruction. Blood and sweat and art that is dangerous to the touch.  

But it's a big psychological push.  Breaking the hymen of social acceptance in my own mind before I even try and do it in other people, when I need, almost pathologically, acceptance.  I don't want to find myself ploughing a lonely furrough any more.  I don't think I can take rejection right now.

needlework

bloodywood

So where to now?  The summer stretches ahead, and I am confined to quarters for at least the next month of it. I hate not working, but I can't shake the paralysis.  Maybe after the results for the first uni year come in this week...  if they're good, maybe that will be validation enough?  Time will tell...

Pandemic Musings 1

So, here we are.  Several weeks into the midst of a global pandemic and labouring under an inept government, the end of my first year of university has gone to shit.

I'll freely confess, I'm struggling to make sense of it.  The plan was to turn around at the end of the year with studio full of work, and say "ta-da, module one complete".  Unfortunately, I;m now quarantined at home (I'm in a severely vulnerable group due to my asthma) and cannot access most of my work.  I have photo's of a lot, but none of my sketchbooks.  Which is where a lot of the development work for this module actually is.

I'm worried.  I'm not the greatest with computers, before this year I'd never made a powerpont presentation.  And now my academic future relies on my making two of them proving that I have satisfactorily completed a module that even the staff haven't thought about since January.  They've moved on. And until this, that wouldn't be a problem.