Exercise 3: What do I want (and need) to do?
Your practice may not be fully formed at this point but it’s useful to think about what you do, begin to describe it and signpost where you think you’re heading. Reflecting on how you go about making your work and how you learn will add to this understanding and help you identify potential self-directed projects you can use to move your practice forward.
Starting to locate your practice alongside what’s currently happening out in the world will give you a sense of where your discipline is heading, what skills you may need to develop and help set a benchmark for what you want to do next.
Use this exercise to audit your practice to date, identifying practical, technical and theoretical aspects, forming an evaluative statement that maps and plans for a sustainable and professional way of working.
Starting with any previous reflective commentary, write a paragraph about your aspirations and ideals, do you have set goals or prefer to work intuitively? Include practical information such as describing your medium and processes as well as the ideas in the work and why you make it. Think about what you are trying to communicate to an audience and who it is intended for.
Are there any key aspects that stand out for you and are more important than others? Highlight these to set out how you may expand and build upon them. Refer back to any mind and concept maps you may have made, identify elements that you think have creative potential and are worth exploring further, both in terms of practical work and contextual research. Identifying connections or threads that you can see running through several projects might present useful starting points or points of intersection.
Use these as starting points to generate some initial ideas and subject areas for you to begin. Don’t worry about whether they are refined at this point – just get everything down so you can investigate these starting points in lots of different directions. Concentrate on the bigger picture, don’t let yourself get bogged down in detail
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I have never sat down and considered what my practice looks and feels like before. So far in my photography, it must have existed in an almost unconscious way so my words below seem new and fresh even to me. Am aware that I can at times internalise and keep my thoughts to myself so in Photography 3 I intend to make a big and conscious effort to write about more of my thoughts, planning and experiences and to provide self-feedback and to use how I look at the work of other students, practitioners and writers.
My practice exists having as a basic, its feet dipped in photography, using both my own work and using found images such as medical scans. I often use found or collected objects as well as photographic images. As I produce my work, my trials and experiments form part of how I research what works for me, although I haven’t always been the best at documenting this. As I am working with medical scans, I have been experimenting with different media, printing on different papers and transparent films all with different properties and opacities which I can then layer together. I very much see this idea of layering as being more than just a pretty technique and is more than the physical process. It is also a way to communicate the passage of time and in a medical sense, to unpeel different layers and structures in the body. I wonder here if I can discover a way, through layering to add in the sense of the self back into technical medical images. My tutor gave me initial feedback on my project, “Crucially, the photographic medium is inextricably entwined with loss and death from its very beginning. In this way, your idea is also very medium specific. (Xenou, 2022) The idea of the importance of my choice of the photographic medium I will use in my practice and in this specific project through my work is something I will have to research and experiment with.
In addition, I am inspired by the written word, often poetry, which I feel, like photography, condenses and distils words down to a fragment of the original view, feeling or thought. I think, particularly related to my current work, the emotion of the written word can be very powerful and inspiring. I wonder about the use of technical and scientific words attached to images for example in medical notes related to x-rays or MRI scans. These seem to me to be lacking in any emotion. This idea of emotion is at the heart of my practice and how the work makes me feel as a creator and how I consider the audience might feel as they experience my work. Ernst van Alphen in his book “Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self” speaks of the emotional wrench of some works describing some works as being able to leave the viewer speechless, causing pain, of being touched and dragged along by a work and of a kind of emotional paralysis (van Alphen, 1992). These are the things I feel when working on my children’s scans. I cannot speak for how an audience might look at my work but maybe through feedback from tutor and other students as I work on this course, I can start to get an idea of these things.
Within photography, I have been experimenting with layering, both digitally and in a haptic sense. I wonder about how my work might develop in the future. I have enjoyed collaborations in the past with poets, graphic artists and artists working with textiles. I do not see any need to think of my photographic based art as being restricted in what form it might take or what direction it might lead me.
My practice has evolved greatly over past few years. Initially, I didn’t understand what I wanted to gain from photography and in which direction this might lead. My recent work dealing with family memory and the past, questioning how visual memory might work especially when there is no photographic trigger and wondering about aspects of society excluded from visual records led me to my current work using medical scan images and trying to find a way to bring a sense of humanity to these. It feels that my projects are interrelated and I am able to pull ideas used from one project and shape them to help form another aspect of a different project. The document in course notes, “Reflect, Propose and Plan” asks an interesting question, how do you learn? I think, the answer to this, is through experience, both in terms of life and what happens and shapes me but also how I have learned in my studies to shape and adapt my practice to the outside world, by which I mean outside of photographic studies. Learning takes place through the experience of having done something before and how I respond to feedback. In addition, learning happens through internal processes, of what gives me satisfaction and the emotional impact of a particular project and of events in life and how these shape me.
My practice has strengths in how I think of ideas and find inspiration. This shaping of what interests and inspires me still feels new to me. This newness and part of my character can bring doubt to my practice. I can at times doubt the value of my work or of my own worth. I suspect many of us have such contradictory feelings. It is something I am aware of and that everything in life doesn’t always travel a straight or even course and as a practitioner, I need to deal with peaks as well as troughs. An example of this would be that when I research and look at the work of other artists and photographers, I often think, wow, how can I ever reach those heights? The senses of light and darkness in what might be thought of as the soul, are very human ideas and things I wonder about in my subjects and how they felt at different times in their life. The sense of empathy is important to me in my work.
Anna Fox and Natasha Caruana speak of practice and research in their book, Behind the Image. Interestingly, they write, “by shooting in the early stages of your project development, while you are still reading various texts and looking at other artists’ work, you will begin to visually track your progress. As this process develops, it is possible to see how this type of practical research is informing the way you are recording your subject and constructing your image.” (Fox, Caruana, 2012)
I must admit that the detail and breadth of lining up the trial and error of visual development alongside written and visual research sources and then using output to track different attempts and to map my processes and ideas feels daunting. Mostly, I suspect, as I have never consciously put such rigour and organisation into how I reach an end point in my work.
References
Fox, A; Caruana, N (2012) Behind the Image: Research in Photography, Basics, Creative Photography, Thames & Hudson, London, (p63)
van Alphen, E (1992) Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Reaktion Books, London (pp 9-10)
Xenou, A (2022), PROGRAMME LEADER DISCUSSION – PROGRESSION FROM LEVEL 2 (HE5) TO 3 (HE6), OCA, [Email communication]
