Blog for Module 528 -

Placements, Interdisciplinary

Initial Ideas

20/11/2023 17:37

My first initial idea for the interdisciplinary placement module was to do something simple like work with a school but I had an interesting idea when thinking about my studio 2 work. So for a self placement idea I thought about the potential of visiting and participating in as many mental health services I could such as counselling with the university or therapy with the NHS and documenting my experience and creating art in response to these sessions. Considering the fact that I have been looking into potentially becoming an art therapist, I believe attending therapy and counselling sessions and then creating artistic responses and journaling my experience would be beneficial and extremely informative for me and my practice. Although I will be learning how these different services affect and or help me I'm not necessarily doing this placement as a means to "test" them or the efficacy of the sessions as I don't think that's fair and different things help different people in a variety of ways, I just want to document my personal experiences and make responses and see how these sessions will imprint on art I create.
To make this concept work as a full placement I intend to visit and interact with as many services as I can which fit under the umbrella of counselling and therapy and mental health support, I will also include, online, over the phone and in person activities, including ones I might have to travel for, I'm hoping to experience a variety of support to gauge different experiences,
I'm aware that I'm going to have to do a lot of research to find out about all the potential things I can partake in, as well as if their suited for me and how far away they are etc., and I might have to sign up for things earlier than semester two in order to be aware of long waiting lists, so I will start my research and reaching out from now. At the end of this module I would love to have a full journal and to create a piece of work reflecting on these documented experiences and how they affected me, I think it ill be informing and interesting, educational and personally illuminating, and I can't wait to see what happens

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Objects that Inspire and Inhibit Creativity

04/10/2023 18:31

On a Tuesday afternoon I had a lesson with my professor Karen about objects that can inspire and inhibit our creativity as people. As a part of the conversation everyone in the class had to bring objects that to them either inspire or inhibited their creative spirits and discuss us it with partners and then the class.

For my object that inspires me I decided to bring in a dream catcher (as seen below), although this is not one, I bought from a store in the past, this dream catcher was a gift from a friend. This dream catcher was handmade by one of my favourite people and given to me as a present, and all of these pieces of information attribute to why it is inspiring. For starters it's something that has been made, this made me think of how so many creative people whether it be musicians or artists or DIYers or even just people with hobbies have this innate human need to “make” to create to use our hands to bring something to life like old artisans. In a way this sort of reminded me of our creative reading module, where we read a text form Ursula Le Guin who spoke about how one of the first items created and used in human history was probably a basket or bowl or bag, something we probably made. The want to make something anything I think is in itself inspiring and is the reason I create a lot of the things I do. The other main reason that I thought this specific object was inspiring was because it was made and given to me by a person, people or being a person is arguably one of my biggest motivators when creating artwork. For example, drawing or painting a person or the fact that being a human person is the reason we have such complex ideas unlike any other living thing such as how intricate the human mind is, which is something I Iove to explore in my artwork. In essence I find people extremely inspiring , whether I'm painting them, talking to them learning or researching about someone its hugely significant to my work and so this dream catcher that was gifted to me by one of my favourite people who has inspired me and my work and been a part of it before, I thought was a great example as an inspiring item.

On the other side of things, the object I chose for concept of what inhibits creativity was my set of house keys. My reasoning for this is that I was trying to find an object that I thought represented everyday life and chores and keys were the best thing I could think of other than perhaps a saucepan or broom. The more I thought about it the more I felt justified with this response, the idea that everyday life, household chores, working, eating cleaning etc inhibits creativity sounds sort of ridiculous but it's true. Even sleeping technically gets in the way and I'm not saying any, or all these things are necessarily bad I just mean having chores to do or work to attend absolutely stops you from creating and making. This concept reminded me of something I read recently that a lot of the old greats in art had a lot of time on their hands to create, they could learn multiple instruments and languages and spend as much time as they wanted to on paintings and this was probably partially due to not having to do their own cooking or cleaning, because that frees up a lot of time. This was a sad sort of realisation because I think in this day and age with the capitalist society I am living in, we are working every second away with a lot of isolation and limited support and all these factors I think make people a lot less creative, on top of people finding it embarrassing, I think it’s a shame that we have such a short time to enjoy ourselves and create art and music and write poetry and I think a lot of people would be happier if they could pursue their hobbies or their creative outlets more, btu that’s just my opinion.

This overall experience was fascinating to me, it brought me a perhaps too much awareness on the situation and made me sort of sad but at the same time I really enjoyed seeing what things my classmates brought in and what their opinions were on the subject and how passionate some of my classmates are on creating.

Ethics Concerning Placement

23/11/2023 11:06

After having multiple sessions with different tutors and also having tutorials discussing ethics in response to working with the public and placement ideas I felt quite conflicted. My idea involves visiting mental health services such as counselling and making artwork afterwards reflecting my experience. The ethical dilemma lies wherein I tell whoever I'm speaking to that I'm going to make art responding to this session or not. On one hand if I finished a session and made some art responding to it by myself not for a project or a placement it might be a different scenario but because I'm purposefully going to these places and have the intent of making art afterwards it feels like a situation where I should inform them that I intend on making art reflecting on my experience. Another con is that I want to be taken seriously in these sessions and I also want the sessions to not be awkward as well but being ethical arguably overrules those notions. Initially I decided that I wasn't going to say anything and that's because my understanding is that if I'm solely making artwork based on how I'm feeling and reflecting on myself there didn't see a need to inform whoever I'm speaking too as the art wasn't going to reflect them in anyway. Whilst this is true and I intend to keep full animosity with whatever organizations I work with and continue to iterate that I'm not testing efficacy or judging I still feel that ethically I should say something during these sessions. So my compromise is whilst I'm not making a formal statement or giving a consent form, I will inform whoever I am speaking to or working with that I am a fine art student and I will most likely be creating work responding to how I'm feeling after. I'm deciding to phrase things this way because I feel as though it is informative whilst staying casual enough so that it wont make my sessions awkward.

Collaborative Workshop Reflection

30/11/2023 23:07

Expressing Emotions

This workshop was the first my class and i undertook, it involved sitting in groups and a person running the workshop would come round and give us a word which was always an emotion. We would respond with drawing and mark making as a group on a single sheet of paper expressing what we felt when thinking about the word for example on of the words was compassion. I thought it was a good idea choosing more complex emotions like compassion, guilt and relief as it made me and others think deeper about the feelings, there are less immediate associations compared to a simpler emotion such as sad.
I really enjoyed this workshop as it led to deep thinking and feeling, it also got people talking and sharing stories as well as opening up but also just philosophically discussing different kinds of emotions. This quick mark making and drawing exercise also got people being creative and loose with their drawings which resulted in some really interesting final pieces.

Black out Poetry

For this workshop we were demonstrated to do black out poetry. We were shown some examples and given supplies and then given free reign. I had a lot of fun with this workshop and it might have ended up being my favourite. I really enjoyed combining my use of thinking to choose particular words and try to poetically make a cohesive themes, whilst also focusing on aesthetics and making it look interesting.
I also really enjoyed the simplicity of this workshop compared to others, i liked how it required few resources and I'm also looking forward to potentially picking this up as a hobby.
At the end we were all instructed to get up and have a look round at each others work, which I loved as I found it very inspiring and extremely interesting to see how other people configured black out poetry. In the end we compiled them all on a wall, see in the image to the right.

How to make researching an artist fun

The aim of this workshop was to introduce the skills of researching an artist whilst keeping things fun and relevant. We did a mixture of seeing a PowerPoint, picking names from a hat and researching the artist online. After researching the artist a a group and finding out about their work and things about them we were then told to create a response. So as a group we had to make a piece of work reflecting the artists style and work they do, we were given wide range of supplies to use. this was incredible fun and a very original take in terms of getting to know an artist thoroughly.
I really appreciated this workshop in terms of trying to develop a skill. I loved all the other workshops a lot but it was interesting seeing how many people opted to demonstrate workshops involving de stressing, having fun and expressing yourself and your emotions, compared to technical skill. So I did find this workshop refreshing as it was quite different to the others as well as it was was quite enjoyable.

Feelings our Feelings, throwing paint.

During this workshop we were instructed to really feel our emotions and let loose. we were given paint filled water balloons and some huge paper to throw them at. It was a really interesting exercise in terms of having to physically involve oneself and use sometimes a lot of force to pop the balloons and paint. it was almost violent, a violent way to express our emotions, which i think is quite poetic because typically emotions aren't gentle, their intense. i also loved the resulting mark making of the giant paint splashes, it was quite beautiful and very chaotic.
Later on we were given the option to work into the paper collectively and we could write or mark make, to further reflect how we were feeling.

My Collaborative Workshop Findings

My workshop group consisted of Myself, Izzy, Emily, Jess and Luke and we all worked quite well together, I was pleased with our work ethic and thought we worked well together. Our workshop was based around creating a mess and reducing anxiety and perfectionism in artists. We did a talk explaining what to do at the beginning of our session and had intended to do a demonstration but had forgot. The atmosphere was brilliant when people started making artwork, everyone took to it really well and was super creative.