I have been showing my creative works and getting feedback, much of which is very helpful to me. In these discussions, I often try to steer my peer group away from making purely technical observations as I am more interested in how the perceive my ideas and the presentation of these ideas rather than technical chat. However, I decided it would be helpful to do some self-critique and ask myself specifically about these technical areas. What materials do I use in my work and why, what choices am I making around size and scale, why do I work predominantly on the computer and how does my work shift when I take things into the tactile? In all of this, how do the technical choices impact on the success or failure of my work? As I think about this it is difficult to divorce technical considerations from the ideas and flow of my workflow and why I produce certain works in the way I do. Below I walk through my process as I created some work on a shared project.

I show below a pinboard I have in my study which I use for inspiration. Each of the points I list and the connections I make on my board resprent creative possibilities and areas of research. At some point this year, I covered up the content with a sheet of tissue paper.  On one level this seems to be hiding the flow of my ideas and the connections between these but I wanted to express the clouded vision surrounding liminality and this sheet of tissue paper reminds me of this every time I look at it. I want to introduce more layers to this ideas board and express the anger, self-doubt and huge discomfort which I associate with the liminal death space. To do this, I will take the board into the garden and set fire to it. This seems a very destructive act which is why I have not done this yet. There are obvious practical considerations of retrieving the partially burned board, putting it back where I study and filling my room with the smell of smoke and burning although this smell would be another reminder of the liminality surrounding death. I am reluctant to burn this for another reason as it feels to me that burning live ideas and project thoughts which act as a map for my creativity is symbolic of closure and is a vibrant expression of closure and death. I have wondered if I would get the same feeling from using a digital sense of fire on the computer. I doubt it.

This board represents a purely physical aspect of my work. It is a personal tool and I have never shown it to any of my peers nor asked for feedback. However, although I have not burned thee board, I have used burning in my work. In my collaborative work with Caroline Black, she took some photographs of the trees in the woods (or maybe in a forest. What is the difference I wonder?). In her work she showed images where the forester had stacked wood and branches into a pyramid shape. This made me think of wood stacked ready to burn and of pyres for witches. I, therefore, selected some of these photographs, took them into the garden and started experimenting with fire. I used real sticks on top of the photograph and made a small fire allowing this to burn slowly into Caroline’s image. In burning, the wood and the surface of the photograph were transformed into ash. Interestingly, I then had some physical ingredients I could use in my work, burned materials, ash, the hole in a photograph. These were filled with meaning related to my project. In this work I was reminded of work by Stephen Gill where he adds physical elements such as seeds, flowers, earth and fruits to his photographs to try and capture a sense of the natural world and merge it with his images. I saw some of his work years back in series I think that was called Hackney Flowers. In my practice, I am less interested in nature than in the liminal. In the collaborative work shown below, we used scenes shot in the woods. I don’t work in a purely physical realm so I took the photographs I had taken of this burning experiment, loaded them onto my computer and started to manipulate what I had created.

Below I show some images which show different stages in my process while working on this series.

Each part of my project work doesn’t always follow the same process. Sometimes I spend far longer on the computer manipulating photographs. As my project is trying to create a visual sense of the liminal, I feel that this is a good fit with working in the digital realm, something removed from reality. One other spin I put on this work is corruption. Does corruption of the image on the computer mirror the burning of photograph but in a digital sense? Am unsure on this as I worry the red block of computer corruption draws my eyes too much. It is an idea I have been experimenting with. This test piece is the first such image have shown from level 3.

For comparison, I show a similar idea delivered in a different way which I started at the end of level 2. This was created in a more physcial way by printing on reverse of a transparency and smudging the image.

It is interesting to me what the digital workplace combined with the physical world brings to my work. I cannot say that one is better than the other but can say they offer me different things. I do not think my work would have the same feel if I abandoned the computer nor if I stopped taking photographs of things that actually exist outside digital data. It is interesting to show this process as part of the showing turns my eye inward as I consider each part of the flow of my work and question myself and my motives and wonder and question my reasons for satisfaction or for disatisfaction.