Submit a short reflective commentary that summarises the work you have done, and articulates the rationales for the choices within your Plan via the assignment activity to obtain feedback from your tutor. 

My dissertation dealt with the reasons why people reach for the camera or photographs when death is near. This had a huge personal element as thoughts of my dead daughter were never far away and my own sense of grief was key. My tutor described my thesis as an extended Memento Mori which is a nice way to think about it. I started the process of my research for my dissertation dealing with a broad subject range and slowly narrowed this down to my submitted work. I wonder if I should have gone further to allow me to go into my subject area in even more depth. Although I continued developing creative works from 3.1 and producing new creative works alongside my dissertation in 3.2, I found that the written work tended to take over and used up a large part of my time. One aspect of the heavy focus on the dissertation was how it impacted the critique and feedback I received for creative works.  It is only now I have reached my final 3.3 Major Project unit that I can truly focus on my creative works, how these fit together and how I will present these. The research I conducted and the range of my learning slowly changed how I think of my creative work. Initially, my project featured my daughter in a clear way, looking at the archive of images she left behind on her mobile phone, at the photographs I took when she was dying and using the medical scan. My work slowly changed to be more conceptual and more about the universality of death rather than the specifics of my own experiences. Having said this, there must be a blurring of the lines here as without Rebecca, I would never have started this project or researched death studies as I have.

I think that these elements of my research, the things I have learned, my interests and what I want to learn next all have an impact of my creative practice and on how I will grow and develop after I finish my studies with the OCA.