Category Archives: Project 1: Reflecting and Planning

Feedback Point 1

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.

Exercise 4: Peer Support

During this part of the course we suggest you reach out to your peers through stage 3 forums and familiarise yourself with existing tutor-led and student-led live sessions in photography stage 3 and wider OCA. 

You may also wish to consider any external peer groups, locally and/or online that you may already be engaged with or have ideas about developing. Take a moment to consider peer support structures, and how these may help support you.

I have several pathways I can use with different groups and individuals to ask for feedback on my work. There is a group of Scottish colleagues I have worked with for a number of years. Pre-Covid pandemic, we used to meet regularly for gallery visits and workshops led by OCA tutor Wendy McMurdo. There is also the Level 3 Critique session which runs monthly. The 3.3 student group is limited because at the present time there are only 3 of us on 3.3 but this group can and does provide feedback when asked. My tutor provides another source of feedback.

External to these OCA based groups, I have joined an association who run regular support groups for post-graduate students and who publish their own journal. This is a relationship I will explore during this year.

Exercise 3 – Defining and Planning

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

Planning

Skills Plan

Skills Development

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.

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Research Task – Graduate Case Study: Jane Weinmann

Browse Jane Weinmann’s OCA Photography graduate case study padlet. 

Add a short note to your learning log with one or two points that may have relevance to your own practice and project development.

It is always interesting and instructive to see the work of others especially when these people have undergone their journey in same learning institution as I have. It fascinating to pick up the points of similarity and of difference. Jane Weinmann is great example. While I don’t know her and hadn’t come across her work during my studies, her work as presented on the OCA Padlet is very instructive. I was immediately struck by the layout and clear delineation of what Weinmann pulled together for her major project. Based on this case study, I have thought about areas of my own work which need further input, whether I haven’t thought of things yet or whether I have worked on these but haven’t produced anything yet in my blog.  On a presentation point of view, I wonder if the Padlet provides a different way of presenting work from my blog which might be more accessible for assessors.

I watched Weinmann’s video production which explained her project and the research which underpinned her work. This was a very engaging, powerful and concise production and is worth consideration as a way to frame and explain my own work. The video can be seen on Vimeo.

Exercise 2: Ethics

What does ethics mean to me in my photography and in particular to my major project?  My project has obvious ethical considerations as I explore subjects surrounding death which might cause discomfort or psychological impacts to my audience. Is it enough to be up front and honest about what my work is about and then to present my potential audience of the choice of walking away or engaging with my work? I think that this would mean that my work must be presented in a way that this choice is available and my work should not be presented in a way that people who have not made this conscious choice could stumble across my work. This would preclude exhibitions spaces where public going about their lives such as hospital corridors, railways stations, outdoor spaces. It also means I would have to think carefully about choice of venue. For example, a hospital which contains the sick and their relatives. How might they respond to a project about loss. Similarly, if project shown in church hall used by the elderly. These considerations a balance as I also feel my work has beneficial element and can help open thoughts and discussion around death. Should this discussion element be part of the exhibition where audience have chance to feed back and to interact with the artist?

Just from my brief thoughts above, I think that framing my motives in a statement of ethics will help to evolve my practice over time. In my practice, I have to tread a fine line between what I want to capture to try to tell stories through my work, and moral considerations when I tackle subject areas which can be challenging and painful.

The points I raise above are the beginnings of an empathetic understanding of my project through the eyes of others and potential impacts on them. Part of this ethics discourse is about describing potential risks and thinking of ways to mitigate such risks. If my work challenges conventions, I need to find ways not to make my work less upsetting and more bland or palatable or ‘middle of the road’ but to recognise the potential risks to others and to see how such risks can be managed.

Ethics of my major project is something I will think on as I work and will return to time and time again throughout this year.

Exercise 1: Reviewing and Situating Your Practice

Produce a reflective document that articulates:

  • past trajectory of your topic, work already undertaken in previous units and that you intend to extend.
  • The context of your work within your specific topic
  • The broader discipline and a statement of intent for the final iteration of your topic and work
  • The rationale for your choices

The introduction to the course notes describes the major project as offering, “a platform to focus on a specialist area of enquiry and to undertake a substantial and sustained body of work. You will devise a project that allows you to explore a field of interest and to further develop your emerging practice.” My work on this project has its roots in the death of my daughter in 2015 and her illness starting in 2014. There was a long period where I was lost in grief and didn’t even understand that I was grieving and searching for a way to express myself. My photography and my research into this area have provided the outlet which I needed and the understanding which I craved.  In 2021, at the end of level 2, I started to look at the medical scan and re-thinking this as children’s games or as works placed on the art gallery wall. As I began level 3, my knowledge increased and my creative work headed in different directions as I looked at the symbolism surrounding death and touched upon memory and loss. Later, I worked to express the liminal threshold of death and did collaborative works exploring text and combining my work with folklore and the forest.

That gives a view of the track which my research and creative interests have been following. Going forward into 3.3, I have given thought to where my interests will develop.

·         I will continue to develop and mature my work around what the liminal means to me.

·         I been experimenting with the corruption of the image which I feel sits well with the liminal.

·         I will consider if physical and tactile work or digital work or a mixture of both best suits my practice.

·         Am interested in the space between having been inspired by the work of John Baldessari. To me, that space can be thought of if I imagine a photograph of a child and another photograph of that child in old age. What goes between these two images?

·         I have been thinking about a multidisciplinary approach and bringing more video and especially sound to my practice. I think that a liminal space consisting of only visual elements is missing much of the information we use in memory.

·         I have also wondered about the use of a child-sized coffin. Could I create this digitally and it becomes a space an audience can enter and fill it with sound and images so that the coffin becomes my gallery? Or should I turn the coffin into a bench, mirroring early work where I change the context of an object?

I can see that my work has been maturing and that as my knowledge increases, so does how I engage with what makes me me. My art and my learning are tools which interact with how I live my life.

For the coming year, I have identified some external sources I can use which will help to refine my practice.

·         I have found a Museum of Loss and Renewal which provides space for artist residencies. This is divided between two sites which focus on Air, Sea and Soil based in the Orkneys and on Place, People and Time based in Italy. Will be interesting to investigate this further. The advantages of such a residency would be in exposing me to practitioners working in my own field with the potential for collaborative work. It would also be interesting to communicate my ideas with strangers and take their ideas on board.

·         I don’t know if there is scope and interest on all sides to extend some of my collaboration work from last year.

·         I want to post work for public viewing, for competitions, and exhibitions. This will be a valuable experience in its own right plus will provide useful feedback.

·         I want to consider publishing written work and how this fits with my practice and future study.

There is a networking element here which builds my contacts from in-University peer groups and starts to include more and more external partners. One of first steps for such engagement is to build myself a website to showcase some of my work and ideas.

I need to consider the skills and experiences my practice needs and then plan on how I identify gaps and how I increase my knowledge to fill these gaps. I have started a crude skills planner which provides me with broad indicators of progress in this area. One part of expanding skills with video, sounds, exhibitions, residencies and more is the cost. Do I investigate the potential for grants? This in itself is another skill and experience. If I need more technical equipment is an alternative to approach a bricks and mortar university Photography department and ask if I could borrow some kit?

I have thought about whether my work is suited to a book or an exhibition but not clear on this yet. I know that hospitals near to me have exhibition spaces in their corridors which I had thought might be appropriate for my work. However, on recent trips to hospitals, I have watched how the public engages with the work on the walls. They often seem lost in thoughts or are hurrying to get to appointments or to visit patients. Many have little time for art. I have also noticed that much of the art tends to be brightly coloured and upbeat. How would my darker, more thoughtful work fit into such a space? I asked peers about this and a helpful piece of feedback was that my work might be seen as challenging particularly to the sick or to the elderly. Maybe a separate and distinct space for an exhibition which an audience has to make a conscious effort to attend is more relevant rather than using a space where people can come into and encounter my art unintentionally. At the same time there is an element to my work which could be thought of as beneficial. Interesting points to consider.

In addition to work within 3.3, I have identified some interests for future projects which I won’t have time for in 3.3 and might just about cram into this lifetime.

I mentioned my dissertation earlier, and it is interesting to consider how my research and any written work will continue in the coming year which I assume is not going to be 100% creative work.  In turn, I wonder about my post-graduate direction. Should I take on board another undergraduate course to broaden my skills? Things such as Sound Art or Fine Arts interest me. Or do I look at a Masters to continue my research interests? Whatever I decide, I can’t see a point where I only write or I only produce creative works as each depends on the other. I also wonder if I looked at future studies how a bricks and mortar University would feel in comparison to home-study.

 

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