1. Write short paragraph highlighting the specific issues and context for your work.
Include the following:
• What was your work about?
• What relation does media/process/method play in respect to your ideas?
• What information (visual or written) have you found which has informed the development of your work – (artists, theory, other)?
At first, I used the ADP blog as a continuation of my sketchbook, but as the project progressed, I decided to have more focus on using a blog than a sketchbook because I felt it suited my working practice better. The work on the ADP blog was mainly an outlet of reflective practice to explore ideas, analyse art history, contemporary artists’ work and sociological context, but also included photographs of my own paintings, drawings and artist book with annotations on techniques used and ideas behind them.
Ideas are very important in my practice, and I think I often tend to value learning new things over the artwork I eventually create, as I feel that, in a way, the process of learning and reflecting is art in itself. Because of this, the blog became a big part of my working process, and I feel that it is the main body of my work, as it links all the ideas together. I generally like to try to understand ideas before trying to create art based on them, which is why I do so much research, and why the blog was so useful to me as it allowed me to write and reflect. Through this research, I then branched out into creating my own drawings, paintings and photographs, documented on the blog, which influenced my ideas in the sense of finding that the images on the blog portrayed my work completely differently to the work in my analogue sketchbook.
Most of my references relate more to the main project I was creating work for, rather than being specifically directed towards blogging. However, the issues did seem to overlap, through the politics of free speech on the internet, as my main project was on the boundaries of acceptability and censorship, and the blog made me consider this from a first-hand perspective.
- Susan Anderson’s “High Glitz” series
- Balthus
- Alan Bennett’s “Playing Sandwiches”
- Freud’s theories on id/ego/superego, and development of sexuality
- James Graham’s weblog
- Lauren Greenfield
- David Hancock
- Lauren Kipnis’s “Bound & Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America”
- Amanda Palmer’s weblog
- Roy Stuart
- Amateur self-portrait photography
- Censorship legislation
- “Consultation on the Possession of Extreme Pornographic Material”, Home Office.
- The Daily Mail
- Fashion advertising
- Perspectives on International Art lecture series
- Pornography
2. Evaluate your work and your progress. Include comments on strengths & weaknesses.
I think that my practice is progressing rapidly as I have done so much research, and those ideas have really influenced my views, and I’ve been working in different ways that I wouldn’t have considered before. I’m finding that the comparative freedom is helping me to pursue challenging ideas and themes in ways that I would have felt unable to do in the past. However, I do feel that more discussion with staff running the ADP module would have helped me to reflect more effectively on my practice, and still feel that I require a more open, equal dialogue to be able to continue with my work in the way that I’d like to and explore ideas fully.
Strengths
- My analytical skills have improved, and I’m much more able to look at context and give my own ideas rather than solely looking at the theories of others.
- I’ve been exposed to more varied types of media and have started to give low culture as much thought as high art, giving me a wider view of what art is and what I can draw influence from.
- Blogging gave me an outlet for reflective practice, which I feel has enabled me to think about what I’m doing and why, allowing my work to develop with conscientious thought and self-awareness.
Weaknesses
- I often find it difficult to integrate research with my own work, and find that media analysis and understanding ideas takes priority over practical work.
- Some seem to have seen my work as unethical, which is probably a weakness from the official standpoint, and something I need to consider further.
- I think in the future I need to create more original images, although it was important for me to use secondary source images from the internet within this context.
3. Which aspects of your work would you like to develop further?
- I intend to continue using a blog to document my ideas, as I’m unable to present research and written theory or ideas as effectively in an analogue sketchbook.
- I want to continue to use the same depth of research, drawing inspiration from art history, contemporary work, feminist theory, and modern media. I feel that it’s important to continue to find not only artists or practitioners that I identify with, but also to study work and ideas that conflict with my own. Similarly, I would like to engage in more discussion and debate – I feel that being allowed to discuss the issues people may have with my work would help my practice to develop.
- I feel that it’s important that I pursue similar themes to the ones I started to explore in the ADP project, as they have always been an important part of my practice, but I didn’t explicitly realise this until being exposed to the level of reflective practice necessary to create a blog. Also, they seemed to spark somewhat of a controversy, and this suggests that there is more to be found in these subjects and how both individuals and the institution react to ideas that don’t conform to mainstream norms and values.
- In doing this, I would like to develop my skills in translating ideas to visual pieces that still maintain and convey their meaning. Hopefully in the future I will be able to find strategies to create thought-provoking pieces, possibly incorporating more irony or parody than the work I have created so far, that don’t compromise their ideals, but instead find more effective ways to make the ideas accessible and visually stimulating.
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