My self-directed work continues on from work started at the end of my level 2 study in 2021. At this current point in time, this is now a 3-year project with my 3.3 study to come. However, in another sense my emotional need to make sense of loss has been ongoing since 2014 when my daughter first got ill and definitely since 2015 when she died. My self-directed work for this year is part of a larger work which conceptualises my ideas of what loss means visualy and how this fits with the liminal space. I do not think that my work should feel constrained in an attempt to try and attain the ‘perfect moment’ which will express all of my feelings which naturally shift with my mood and with time. Beyond this idea of progression, I am starting to form an opinion on the spaces between my works. If each work represents a moment in time, then so must the space between. Does this space have texture or form or a border? Is it nothingness? Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel describes nothingness as a space with no details, no sense of space or time without dimensions and no features. (Hegel, 2010, pp. 59–82) So maybe nothingness is not the feeling I want to convey. At the same time, is nothingness the space where we begin as beings, where thoughts start or where literature or artwork begins from an empty page? I feel that this fits very well with my exploration of liminality and will be an area I continue to explore in my next year of study.

In this most recent test piece, I have made a sequence of work with simple white space between each and presented it in the form of a strip of film. Further development of the idea of nothingness involves sound, interference as in an untuned TV, textures of old paint or perhaps the written word.

The idea of sound linked with memory is a concept which interests me and that I would like to explore more but I do not know if this might come outwith the confines of my undergraduate study and is something I will continue to look at after my study is complete. Is sound such as the wind moving through a space an echo of the people who have used that space in the past and so is an echo of memory? When I was reaching out for potential partners for external projects I exchanged emails with a lecturer at University College in Cork, Ireland and when I told them of an earlier form of this idea they suggested this might make an interesting basis for an MA. I don’t know if I have the required skills for this but if I wanted to explore this concept fully I might need extra skills in sound recording and reproduction. Something to think about for the future.

References

Hegel, G. W. F. (2010) The Science of Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511780240.008.