This month my time was spent in designing and creating several test pieces building on previous creative works and the feedback given on these.

I want to pen a few thoughts on what motivates me to create my works. In part this is due to a cathartic sense where I try to understand myself better and work through the strong emotions related to death and loss. I wouldn’t describe this necessarily as a healing process but would call it an understanding process. I don’t believe people are healed from the experience of mourning but instead learn to accept and cope with this. Mourning in a way is learning about death and loss. More specifically related to my own personal experience of loss, my work contextualises my own sense of loss set against societal systems and norms surrounding memory, death, loss and remembrance. I would like to go to heart of this sense and look at death in childhood but I know that the closer I get to heart of my own sense of loss, the more painful this will be.  As I work through this learning and developmental process, I have thought and discussed with my tutor about how others might view my work and how painful it might be for an audience. Am also conscious of whether I wanted to tell my story for the benefit of others or whether my work is purely for myself. This seems an appropriate question at this stage given the feedback on literal or philosphical work and how others might view a piece. Is my work for myself or for others? I think for me, as a photographer and artist, the stories I try and tell and the questions I ask through my visual imagery are expanded by the interaction with an audience. The audience has the breadth and capacity to take my work in unexpected directions as each person might think or react differently. The bond between the artist and the audience has the potential to create waves that resonate out from the centre. I do not know how much time I should spend considering the audience at this stage in my research and in creation of test pieces. Maybe there is no right answer but if this bond is a part of my creative practice, then awareness is no bad thing as long as I don’t allow myself to be too influenced by it at this time.

One theme which cropped up in my test pieces this month as I was thinking about literal and more philosphical work was the simplicity or complexity of my work.  Not just in terms of meaning but, as this is a photography degree, also in terms of the visual choices I make. I have a sense that a more simplistic visual piece has, or can have, a stronger impact but at same time does the message it conveys work the same as a visually more complex and intricate work? Beyond this idea of complex, simple, literal and philosphical is a sense that my work will deal with emotionally challenging subject matter and maybe it is that I should focus on instead of worrying too much about audience reactions. The subject matter and research drives the creative choices and the audience are something very distant.

I don’t want to be too dismissive of my work but I feel a little dispirited about my test pieces this month. I feel they are interesting but they have a limited emotional challenge to them. I have a strong negative feeling right now around my chosen area of study and my response to this. Having said this, such feelings are normal for me within my creative process although maybe this project produces bigger peaks. Periods of doubting myself, negativity and producing ideas which I think are lacking in value are opposed at other times with positivity and a sense of purpose. Maybe embarking on such a potentially dark project which so tightly connects with personal feelings of loss and doubt and questions of my own worth, then such extreme feelings can be understood.