I received feedback today on my final Level 2 unit, Digital Image and Culture.

I have never been someone who is too concerned with what mark I been allocated as the feedback always been of more value to me. I have to admit that the feedback was very positive and unexpected as I felt I had mucked up my assessment. Interesting how my work is seen by me and how it is seen by others.

The assessment team commented, “We felt this submission demonstrated a marked improvement over previous modules and we congratulate you on your progress in finding your personal voice both within the practice and your contextual studies“.

I think this is interesting as I felt my practical work for Landscape was stronger than for DIC. Maybe the difference here was in how I explained my choices and my path to those choices and linking these things back to historic examples and scholarly articles. The assessment team commented further, “impressed by the level of your engagement with the research that underpinned your Understanding across the module. This was especially evident in your written work in which you demonstrate comprehensive and confident critical thinking in your interrogation of photographic manipulation at various points in history, and then make significant judgements on how different stakeholders understand this history”. Interesting to me that I can see in my mind’s eye how I could have shifted my approach to Landscape. However, that not the important thing here in going backwards and in getting a better mark for that particular unit. Instead, the important thing is the progression and development in myself. I hope am not setting myself up here for a fall.

Other than making me feel good about myself, how to apply this feedback to my current work? The assessment team commented on my project raising an element of humour through my work which acted to counterbalance the serious and difficult nature of my chosen subject.  They suggest I expand on my ideas, pursuing this haptic element of my work and suggest I go beyond digital maquettes (I had to look up what this meant). This is interesting to me the idea of mixing a sculptural piece with photography and presenting my work maybe as an installation art piece. There seems to me to be a symbiotic relationship here between the production of my work and how I present this work of the medical image and bring it to the art space and with the chosen art space itself and with the audience who use this space and will experience my work.

The idea of humour and of not being too dark and serious is very interesting. My subject is based around loss and death and medical interventions which involve pain and scarring and yes sometimes loss. Is this too brutalist? Is that what the assessment team are saying? I have spoken on this very subject with my tutor before. It is interesting that I can keep the brutalist side in full view but can play with the medical image and, if I choose, soften the impact. Lots to think about.

The haptic side is also very interesting. My previous tutor did tell me that he thought my haptic work was better than my work on the computer. By better (and these are my own words here) he meant, clearer in design and purpose with a more tightly defined purpose. The medical scan tends to exist purely in the digital realm so it is can be fun and can be challenging to experiment with the physical form of a scan, relating my experimental forms to both the scan itself, what the scan is for and to the underlying emotion which is always present. At this stage in my thinking, I just have endless ideas and possibilities as I wander down different rabbit holes and explore the different directions my research and physical work leads me. I worry that I don’t have a concrete idea of where my work is heading at this stage.