Scope:
Use this exercise to define and plan a Major Project that explores and develops your emerging practice.
We may want to start by exploring what your personal goals might be for this unit and beyond. These could be long term ambitions that brought you to study photography in the first place or recently discovered passions. Combine this with what you learnt during the exercise above to form an understanding of the direction you want to travel with your Major Project.
Draft your Project Plan (max 1,200 words) and consider it in as much detail as possible. This document should include:
- practice and research aims and outcomes
- a detailed timeframe of proposed activities in order to execute and complete your Major Project, within the framework of the unit
- a detailed breakdown of any costs and funding routes
- ethical considerations
- a plan of promotion (at least in terms of networks).
Resources that might be useful at this stage are:
- Reflect, Propose and Plan – will help you reflect on your current position, propose new projects, and plan ahead.
- Locating Your Practice – provides ways to help you deepen your awareness of your discipline and its subject boundaries.
- Creative Strategies – offers different creative strategies to help you consider, develop and extend your creative process.
- Engagement and External Projects – offers starting points to help frame your research, practical project work, and your overall position to outward-facing creative opportunities.
- Synthesis of Practice and Research (3.2 Resource section) – encourages you to explore these connections through testing and interpreting.
- Aspects of the Enterprise Hub, in particular the section on Ethics.
Project Plan Draft
This exercise asks for a draft project plan expressed in 1,200 words. It feels very early to produce such a plan including things such as a detailed breakdown of costs and a plan of promotion but I will start with what I know with an awareness that my plan is likely to develop and change. One aspect of my plan is that even at this early stage, I think that the plan needs to serve different aspects of my major project and my learning; using the 1,200 words to provide some depth and background to my thoughts and to explain myself is a good idea and is distant from tradition Project Management planning with which I am very comfortable., In addition to the words, I think it is a very good idea to have a visual representation of my plan to sit alongside my words. Within this visual representation of my plan, I can break this down into two parts. Firstly, a plan which shows the coursework against time. Secondly, a plan to show the gaps in which I try to show what I think I might need but at this stage am uncertain about. I could summarise this as what I know and what I don’t. I can easily imagine further planning will develop from my unknowns such as what my final output looks like, whether a book, an exhibition whether digital or real and so on. Each of these choices needs research and planning.
Practice and Research Aims and Outcomes.
This final year of my degree asks me to use the skills learned and the experiences I have gained and to supplement this knowledge as required to construct my major project and to consider how and why this work should be displayed.
My art practice has grown from my experience of traumatic grief after the death of a loved one. I investigate loss, and memory, trying to imagine the liminal threshold between life and death. I am finding my place within the field of death studies and am striving to push the boundaries of my work and to see how my work and myself as an artist, integrate with other artists and academics.
My outcome was initially about producing work, whether creative pieces or research which would help me understand my own place in loss and how we remember our dead. This final unit on the major project, has introduced a different feeling less about internalising my own emotions and more about producing work for others which might help them in their own experiences of grief or maybe open their minds to different ways of thinking.
These aims and potential outcomes are tied in with my planning, the skills I think I will need and the testing of my ideas through asking for, and giving, feedback and in expanding my network of contacts.
Detailed timeframe
I have drawn up early visual indicators of where I am and where I think I need to be at the end of this unit.
These indicators can be found at the following links:
Coursework Plan
Skills Plan
The initial skills I have listed that I think I might need to work on include skills related to sound and video recording and editing, business writing for proposals, grant applications, exhibition entries, residencies etc., promotion, marketing and building my network of contacts and skills around the planning and construction of an exhibition. To help me develop these skills, I will focus on preparing works for submission to open calls and will also look into artist residencies. I am specifically interested in seeking out opportunities with artists who are working in my own field. Earlier in my studies, my collaborations have been with other artists who have their own interests and whose projects are distant from my own work. I think it would be an interesting experience to share work with others interested in loss. Who share a close relationship with my own interests. I will look at other artists who have produced and exhibited works in this area and how they went about their tasks.
In this year, I will continue to build and add to my body of work, concentrating on the production of mature pieces and always keeping in mind the space my audience needs to get the most from my work without me leading them by the nose. Early on this year, I have been investigating computer glitches, what these do to the visual image and how it feels to have accidental input to my work. As a counterpoint, I have also been looking at more deliberate corruption in my work.
Costs
Costs for my project at this stage are not well understood. Do I need help with large scale printing for an exhibition or for creating a book for example or with exhibition space? Is such funding available? Who would I approach? These questions and the answers are part of my list of unknowns which I think will crystalise as I get deeper into this unit.
Ethical considerations
The ethics of working around loss are right there, large and unavoidable at the very forefront of my work. How do I show my work without causing pain or distress in others? How much consideration should I give to my audience and whether they might ‘like’ or be ‘disturbed’ by my work? Do I just accept that what I do won’t appeal to everyone? Is this an important part of my creative process that I shouldn’t try to please everyone? How do I create my work and maintain my mental health? I don’t have answers to all of these questions at this stage. It is something I will return to as my plan develops.
Plan of promotion
This is another aspect which is on my list of unknowns. How my Major Project develops would seem to come before how and where I promote this. Maybe if I had been through this process before, ideally more than once, my approach to planning would be different but I see no way at this point in time to avoid pitfalls and potential false starts.
Word count 1,026