My course is progressing well. I am trying to blend my time in looking through course notes, conducting research, reading (quite a lot of reading), reacting to feedback and using all of these strands to slowly build one upon the other to form my own sense of my developing practice which compliments my interests and will decide how my physical work develops.
One of my concerns as I write this report is that an assignment based around a review of a plan and a progress update does not always provide a huge amount, I can say which feels as if it might be relevant to tutor feedback nor to assessment. I will however, set down what I have been looking at in past month with links to my work.
I have spent a little time adjusting the layout of this website. I was conscious that time spent doing this is in a way “dead time” which does not contribute to my creative work but felt the need to make some changes to try and make it feel more logical to myself on how the layout flowed, what the menus were called and what they contained. My adjustments took into account early feedback from tutor regarding my approach to this unit and from spending time speaking to other students and reviewing their blog posts.
One thing which came from my last piece of tutor feedback/discussion was a suggestion that I record my feelings. How do I feel about my work? How do the different concepts and areas of research and creative works I review or create make me feel and react? Looking beyond initial feelings, how do I react and stop and think and revisit a chosen topic and how does reflection and time shape my responses and perhaps change or extend my perspective? This level of reflection isn’t something I have done before in a visible way. So, while putting all these thoughts down on paper doesn’t always feel natural to me, the idea of externalising my internal workings and thoughts and feelings and reactions feels like it could become an important strand in my work. I will use this as a strand to expand my practice and maybe allow me to think on things more clearly and at same time show other people my thought processes and my working.
I looked at two pieces of research based on discussion from last month’s feedback. I think I might change how I do such research and rather than doing this then not referring to it again, for the research areas which interest me the most, I might well revisit, perhaps many times. My first piece of research was on boxes. My initial thoughts on this related to the box as a way of containing artefacts and ideas and perhaps memories. This infers that the boxes are a means of exclusion and of keeping some things on the outside. I looked at some work by other artists and the idea of opening hidden spaces, I thought was a good match for the medical scan revealing hidden spaces within the body. I want to further expand on the work I have done here and look at some different materials for boxes and containers. In part this relates to work done in Photography 2: DIC where I produced haptic works. This week I received feedback from the assessment team on that work.
My next piece of research was about the symbolism and symbolic representation of death. I wondered why we deal with death in terms of symbolism and abstraction. I also expending my work here to think about tattoos which often feature some of the same symbols. The idea of bringing a different art form such as tattooing interests me. The idea of the lifelong permanence of the tattoo somehow feels close to the imagery surrounding death. In my mind’s eye, I had initially thought of displaying my work in a long hospital corridor but what about displaying it on the human body? Would this be an extension of people who choose to tattoo their children’s names on themselves? This work is very interesting to me and very broad in scope.
I do not know at this stage if death or the abstract symbols linked to death and loss will form part of my work or how I weave the different strands of my work together. I originally envisaged my project as being based around the medical scan and trying to find a way to put back the person that is missing in those medical images. One potential revelation is to consider what is missing in a photographic sense from a medical scan image. There is no sense of who the person is, so no sense of self. But there are other missing factors. The scan has no sense of place. It could have been taken in any bland medical room in any hospital in any city. The scan also has no sense of time. I can tell when certain scan images were invented but how do I know if the scan was taken last month or many years ago or in the morning or evening? These things hold true other than if medical notes are added to the scan giving a name, date, time, location. One other disturbing element is that the scans of my son and daughter come from their medical files so I associate these scans with them. In reality could scans represent any of us or perhaps all of us?
How then to think of the scan as the basis for a photographic project when it seems to represent so little other than to medical professionals? Maybe one way to think about my project, if I were to use boxes or collections as a basis for my thoughts, is that there are different aspects to the scan; the person, the place, the emotion, the circumstance that led to the scan. If these ideas are missing from the scan and I have to find a way to put these back, then is the scan ultimately about loss? Loss ties closely with the abstraction of skulls and bones and things we associate with death. I still don’t feel any sense of resolution as to where my project is heading but the idea of looking at the different things that are missing in a scan somehow feels very important so I must do more research and thinking about this area.
One other interesting thing I found in the graveyards was old graves where the stonework been broken or tumbled over or worn away, whether through the passage of time, pollution or just neglect as nobody cares for the grave. Some grave stones are covered in thick moss or plants. The words carved into the graves are often eroded down to nothing. This idea is something I want to work on. Is the person forgotten as family moved away? Are the family or friends themselves dead? Are these people not in any way famous and over the years have attracted no attention? This also ties to idea of unmarked graves which is something I spoke with my tutor about. I wondered about these gravestones which commemorate a hidden or unknown person and I wondered if I could repurpose such stones to display a piece of my own work. This would give the stones a new story and a new life? It seems to have a parallel between the anonymous or dehumanised nature of medical scans. As I look at this area more next month, I will use some of the photographs I took.