If you took the opportunity to present your work during Project 5 you might already have a selection of reflective thoughts and feedback from various audiences. Using these as a starting point spend some time looking back over the work you have made, thinking critically about its themes, methods, ethics and what it communicates to an audience. Check this with your personal aims for the work and your practice as a whole. You may need to adjust the work you plan to make or the plan, either is fine.

I have received valuable feedback from my tutor, my peer group of fellow OCA students and of people who attended the same artist’s residency as me.  These comments although from different sources, seemed to follow a similar path with comments about being more definite about my narrative, in shaping the order of the work which makes up my major project to define the flow of my work and help identify duplication and find any gaps, to tell my story logically and clearly.  More general feedback comments related to my project having a very strong personal involvement which again relates to the narrative or flow of the work I present. I been thinking about how to present my work whether I try and find a traditional gallery setting or a non-traditional setting perhaps outdoors or in an abandoned property. This second option might mean I get less visitors but a different way of presenting my work might be to make a video of the exhibition. This would be a huge improvement over a 100% digital exhibition which I have been experimenting with. A video would then act as a gateway for my work and could sit on my personal website and allow a much larger potential audience to see my major project. I received some very positive feedback from my peers on this idea. One said that the idea of holding exhibition somewhere which might have very few or even no visitors is an interesting way of responding to grief as something we often deal with on our own. Another gave me feedback, “Your idea of staging the exhibition in an abandoned location is intriging; the desolate setting would underscore the sense of emptiness after a loss. There is a poetic beauty to abandoned places that words cannot fully capture, but this essense can be conveyed through your photographs. I can envision how this would come across powerfully, and a filmed documentary could serve as a compelling addition.” This second element of exhibition needs careful thought. In simple planning terms, I would need to find a suitable property which would mean looking online but more likely visiting the area. I would need to investigate ownership and permissions. This might mean speaking to local residents or the local council. For property which been abandoned for much longer and might be missing its roof, this permission element might be of less importance although I can imagine it would depend on location, ownership of the land on which the property sits and how close teh abndoned property might be to other properties. I would need to consider how safe the property is and whether the floor is rotten for example

I have been thinking long and hard about the order of the work and how I communicate my personal message about loss and grief to my audience. I have compiled a new order and introduced some new works to address the balance of my major project between the actual and the conceptual. I still have doubts over the end of my exhibition . Perhaps that end piece will fall into place when I lay my hands on the see-saw. One of main questions within this rethinking is whether or not I make Rebecca’s image part of my project. When I wrote my dissertation I made a conscious decision to exclude her image from my list of illustrations. My thinking was that her image means so much more to me than it did to my audience and how could I begin to communicate a sense of her from an image. I think my audience might expect to see her. In my revised sequence I have thought long about this point. I will seek more feedback on this revised sequence and on the new works within this sequence I show for the first time.