End of Stage Two Review

Initially I began my journey into the ‘Gather, Assemble, Connect’ project by brainstormed all the ideas I had in my head, spending the time to extend every possible pathway on the page to its limits to ensure I had the broadest range of ideas. This was hugely beneficial to me, as previously I have launched into one idea without taking the time to investigate into the possibility of any other concepts. On the first studio day the most available material to everyone was a box of magazines on the end of the workbench, which sparked my first creation of a series of working combining charcoal and images from magazines. In my opinion, some of my most visually successful pieces of artwork originate in this first stage of the project, due to their aesthetic properties and care taken to choose the best possible colors and materials.

Other examples of my most successful work in this project include my work with faces; most of which was produced in the space of one studio day. I think this was successful because I had a very productive studio day where my high motivation led to a strong a high production rate of work, which was all linked together in the GAC project. On reflection now, despite my high volume of work for this topic, I think a few more focused studio days with less time spent worrying about the finished product of my artwork would have been very beneficial for this project. This would have ensured a more in depth focus of study into one area of my art, rather than a more sporadic and loosely connected course of exploration. My continuous notation and reflection in my smaller sketchbook throughout this project was the main source of progression throughout this project, particularly at the end of the project when I explored wider contexts of my art I had produced towards the end (work with cassette tapes, records and clothing zips).

Taking this idea on board, I launched straight into the here and now project after discussing my ideas with peers and family members (a skill I learnt was vitally important to me last rotation after discovering my need for discussion with other people to fuel my ideas). Not wanting to eliminate any possibilities of avenues to explore, I kept my work at the beginning very exploratory and broad, looking into sound and audio as a form of art. Similarly, to the GAC project, I think some of my early experimental work was hugely successful, such as the tracks displayed on my SoundCloud account where I investigated the effects of combining different types of speech and sound together. Having learnt from my last project, I decided to eventually incorporate this in my final outcome (‘HEADSPACE’ video) which added another effective element to the piece. Despite taking almost two weeks out of this project due to and Oxford visit and the need to create a music portfolio for university applications, I was still ale to manage my time efficiently on this project (and encompass my music and photography work from the two weeks off) which I believe is one of the key factors to contributing to its success. I can measure this through my positive peer feedback, and completion of several objectives I set out for myself at the beginning of the project, including “being able to find out how to incorporate my music and compositional skills into my artwork” which ended up being the underlying focus of my art. Setting out goals for myself was also an efficient way of creating a starting point for idea generation, as it opened my eyes to what I wanted to achieve by the end of the Here and Now project. Not only was this hugely rewarding when accomplishing these ambitions, but allowed me to discover more about myself as an artist, reinforcing my decision to study music next year.