It was great to see everyone again after our break and wonderful to welcome Nuvea to our group. The talk through the content and focus of the unit was informative. I am excited to hear that the unit will be more practice based and that there will be a framework in the form of a PPP to keep us on track although it is allowed to be flexible.
We will be encouraged to keep testing our boundaries, along with theory, practice and dissemination. Although we won’t have to worry about an audience or exhibiting our work right now, we will start to look at who our audience is and where we fit into the wider context of contemporary art practice.
I loved the artwork that was shown in the slides by Richard Giblett called Mycelium Rhizome. It immediately caught my eye as I have been reading a lot of natural science books and recently did a photoshoot of mushrooms in the forest. Also my interest in the way thoughts are formed and transformed through neural pathways. The Rhizome made me think of these pathways. I have put ‘A thousand plateaus on my reading list.
We were asked to make a start with our PPP by answering a few questions that were given. I have made a separate post in which I answer these questions and explain my refined focus. I will be adding and adjusting my PPP in that post.
I shared some of my thoughts with the group during our discussion. The feedback I got after sharing (mainly from Hayley) is that I should try to change the approach from this unit and focus less on theory and try to gain momentum and clarity through pure art-making. I agree that this is not the case for everybody in our group but for me it is certainly a must. I got a bit stuck on research and theory in Unit 1.1 and it made me a bit paralysed and blocked for some reason… The break was good for gaining insight into this and a new desire to play and have fun with my materials again and break away (for a while) from the seriousness of research.
Excited about this unit!