Feedback from Assignment 3

It’s taken me a bit of time to get to recording my reflections on my tutor’s feedback because I was already working in Assignment 4 before I had my Assignment 3 tutorial and I needed to document all that I’ve been doing. I also wanted a bit of a clearer mind for my reflections, having been unwell the last month or so.

I really liked my feedback this time. My tutor took on board what I said about wanting more constructive criticism and thoughts on how I can improve my work. One of the things she said was that she’d like to see more mixed media experimentation. In my mind this roughly translates as ‘why did you stay in and work during play time? Make sure you go out and play next time!’ As my previous post shows, I have embraced that piece of feedback wholeheartedly.

An interesting idea was to join up different ideas on my mind maps by making connections between different ‘legs’ of the spider. This could yield some unique and crazy ideas to take forward and develop. It reminds me of conversations with my youngest brother. Whenever I’m beginning a body if work, I try to have a phone call with him. He’s dyslexic and his brain makes connections at lightening speed while I’m still following my sequential thoughts. We have mad conversations in which most of what we come up with is complete and hilarious nonsense, but in the midst of it all a few solid, original ideas come out that I then reflect upon and develop. I suppose that’s the out loud fairground ride version of a mind map. with zig zag lines all over it!

There were some technical points, such as proper referencing, putting thin lines around images to stop them floating on the screen and show where the substrate ends - this was in relation to the white square backgrounds for my compositions. That would indeed make it much more clear how I used the space as an element of composition. 

Also, to use the library more, rather than just the internet, for my research. To be pedantic, the library is itself online - however, that’s not the point. I don’t always find it easy to access the library because if I try to go there directly it won’t accept my login details. However, my tutor’s comment reminded me that I did find a way into the library via OCA Learn. So now I just need to remember what it was! Also to start making connections between other practitioners’ work and my own. (I do actually do this but I need to write about it more and show more of my experiments).

During our tutorial, I explained to my tutor the difficulty I’m having in planning my work, given that the assignments don’t have a standard timeframe for how long each one takes. This led me to only allow 4 weeks for Assignment 2, which was a huge project. I worked too many hours in order to meet the deadline and felt too much under pressure. This had two consequences.

Firstly, I felt under pressure, which slowed me down and impacted on the quality of my work. I have learnt that I am way more productive and experimental when there is no deadline in sight and when instructions are less prescriptive, or when I interpret them more loosely and follow my creative processes more. But as soon as there is pressure, like too much to do in the time I allocated to Assignment 2, I do more hours and produce less, and the liveliness of my art starts to diminish. 

Secondly, pressure and deadlines can make me ill. I think working in the way I did for the first two assignments in December and January contributed to my bipolar flaring up and meaning that I’ve had to take time out from the course.

My tutor mentioned ‘the leisure route’ of doing the course without the assignments, therefore being able to pursue my own interests in following the course materials and skipping over parts that don’t seem so useful for my own objectives of what I want to get from the course, rather than working to the course objectives and assessments. I’m not sure whether I want to do this or not, but ‘the leisure route’ is too good a title to waste and so I’ve fully embraced it! Meanwhile, I’ve emailed Learning Support to see if they can make any reasonable adjustments for me to manage the course better, and to ask about the non-assessed route. 

The ‘leisure route’ really appeals to me as a concept, regardless of whether or not I do the assessments. The last Exercise of taking all those photos and making mixed media images from them was so much fun and so inspiring. If I could do that every day I would quite possibly have a perfect life! Somehow in the last few months art became work. I guess it’s because I’m studying a different approach to image making than what I’ve done before, and it’s taking some time to find my feet. Also I have a bit of a tendency to think that if I’m having fun that can’t count as work. I know this but it’s hard to shake off. 

Conclusions: relax and enjoy making art, and reserve the feeling of work for the things that matter, like referencing and blogging. Enjoy, explore, behold (look deeply) and ingest the work of others who inspire me. Be curious about what, how and why they do what they do. Can I do that? Why not try? And have more crazy conversations with my brother!