Visual Narratives - End of Module Evaluation

Theoretically, I really liked this project, having the opportunity to leave the studio and visit somewhere new to actively pursue stories, collecting information and source material; the excitement of stumbling upon valuable material is quite addictive. I love the engagement with life and the world around me that comes with journalism and enjoyed building my confidence in approaching strangers, meeting new people and trying to tell their stories through my work. The thing that challenged me the most was translating what I discovered into engaging work that does the stories justice, because no matter how good the story is, the execution of them is paramount to the success of the work. I don't think that I told the stories I discovered particularly well, the resulting work ending up quite vague and subtle in it’s message, perhaps leading to the downfall of my project and intended aim. This was probably due to a lack of experimentation with my responding work, adopting comfortable and ‘safe’ approaches to image making instead in an attempt to tell a more conceptual story. However, because the final story lacks clarity, this investment of energy was perhaps misplaced. 

I believe part of the reason why my response to this brief was somewhat limited was due to a large dip in my motivation and confidence in my work around christmas time. I started doubting my abilities and my nature as an image maker, leading to over-thinking and anxiety regarding my practice. Talking to a tutor helped with this and adopting a more relaxed mindset about my work, something which I am still in the process of improving and implementing into my practice. For the next project I am setting myself limits with my image making, forcing me to be more creative and loose, allowing myself to make more mistakes in the pursuit of pushing my practice further. I think I should also make an effort to blog about these feelings more too, because getting them out helps to process them properly.

Contextual research was slightly limited in this project, but the work of David Lemm was very inspiring in my thinking surrounding symbols and meaning within diagrams. Non-representational drawing is something I would like to explore further to move away from my current approach to illustrating. I am interested in translating non-physical things into drawings, such as the feelings of a place, or the idea of a journey.

I hope to make more work that involves going outside of the studio, gathering inspiration from the real world, the people in it and the stories present in our everyday. This approach to gathering source material will inherently make my work more interesting and engaged, allowing me the opportunity to immerse in what I am creating. Thinking less and doing more will also aid my progress as an image maker; thinking is something I always want to develop and is usually the thing people pick up on in my work, but I strongly believe there is either a balance between thinking and doing, or they are just entirely different practices, meaning I need to develop my ‘doing’ practice to match my thinking. One can easily cripple the other and I need to make an effort to stop letting this happen.