As well as the sharing of works between my collaboration partners and myself and the bouncing ideas off one another as if it a game of tennis, one other aspect of collaboration is how the ideas generated within this sharing space can be used as input and inspiration for further thought and development of my own self-directed work. As I write this, I question myself about the term “self-directed”. Is work which uses input from the external project still “self-directed”? I think, in answer, that every project makes use of things we have seen or been inspired by. Work which does not use external reflections must be rare indeed. Does any creative work come out of a vacuum?

This thread of where we seek inspiration can become twisted and intertwined. One example of this has been my collaboration with Deborah Humphrey where we have been looking at text along with the visual image. My work with Caroline Black has also gone through a period where we also investigated text using poetry alongside our imagery. The more people I worked with, the more opportunity there was for overlap in what we did. Sometimes, I had sense that these ideas sometimes went down blind alleys but on reflection, I believe there were no failures here as each test piece, told its own story, whether through what we produced or through the experience in working and in shared working and on the impacts these processed had on our developing artistic practice. One thing which I found useful was in taking shared pieces and using these in my self-directed work. I have been working to try and present my work which leaves space for the audience to come to their own conclusions and isn’t too obvious or contrived or that as an artist I am not too controlling. I often feel that using words in my work produces this feeling that there isn’t enough space. I have a huge amount of respect for artists who use words such as Ian Hamilton Finlay whose work called Marine I came across in an exhibition in 2021 in Edinburgh’s City Art Centre.

In some of my work with Deborah where we had used text, working on my own, I decided to strip away the text, trying to reveal a simpler idea behind a work and whether I could present the same idea without any text. In my piece with text, I took a video of a book with pages blowing in the wind. To this I added an old fashioned border and text as if this the end of a film. I went back to this and stopped away the text and border as being superfluous to the actual idea of the work. I show my two versions of this piece below. The second I was experimenting with how the book as an object allied with the pages turning in the wind could represent the passage of time so I added a much darker semi-opaque layer over the book.

The second piece is still not fully satisfying to me and needs more thought. I also need to improve my skills on video editing but this a helpful exercise in how to adapt my own work from the shared collaboration space.

Another example was with Caroline. We had discussed use of wool as with newborn babies as elderly relatives often knit little presents for the new baby or the baby to come, which is a sadder thought should baby not survive. The woollen garment was symbolic of memory, of birth and of loss. It had a rich texture. We started with a mixture of my photograph of a ruined graveyard overgrown with trees. To this Caroline created a textured landscape using wool underneath the sky and the grass. I then created a complex image where I layered burned photographs, ash, forest scenes and a sense of movement off the page. I thought about how to simplify and refine this image in my own practice. My attempt used an image of some knitwear from Sarah Claeys which I found on Unsplash. I cropped, stripped away colour and overexposed image then framed it off centre. This image had the feeling of a fern which spoke of the forest in our shared project as well as the wool and all that it implied which fitted my own project related to the liminal. Best of all, I think the image doesn’t tell the full story and leaves the audience free to explore. I presented this to some peers for feedback and someone described it as a more mature work. Interesting to think on this.