Review of The Year

I suppose I hit the floor running when I started on the Interactive Arts BA (Hons) degree course this year. I was working on a project through the summer and during that time, I had been experimenting with wood, metals, collage and researching artists such as Joseph Cornell and Christian Marclay. These artists are what was recommended to me by course tutors Hazel Jones and Jon Biddulph.
When arriving at the start of the year, it was realised that I had not received any correspondence on the summer project or the Mail Art project. I am interested in Mail Art and I had already some Mail Art to post so, I was in the clear with this side of the project. I then had to devise a fun game that was to be played with at least 6 students, I made a game called The Spiral of Terror, I had fun devising this game and still play it with my pals.
We where given a brief by Hazel to start up and use a blogging system to place research, thoughts, artwork and other interesting information. I found this very informative and extremely useful within my work and philosophy about art and design. I always keep it up to date, get regular correspondence from China, upload images of my work and generally use it as a thought process.
What I rather have is a brief to work to and they didn’t come that much on this course. It is a free way of working but sometimes, freedom can be confining. We were given an outline and the theme was FOOD. This was a cross year (one and two) theme and I decided on making four collages that included painting and found lettering. There was an exhibition taking place on collage so I included my four collages into the show.
After the inductions, I decided to use the workshops to experiment with wood. I made some typography and some boxes for future thoughts. The lectures with Hazel were a little odds and soddsish but interesting as ever and the main Friday lectures were informative. The seminars, I felt, was quite so-so.
I have worked within my sketchbooks as much as ever this year and they show what my creative process and niches are. They include paintings, photography, diagrams, collages, studies and typography. I have managed to fill four large sketchbooks and now have started my fifth.
After Christmas, I began to feel ill and withdrawn and after a prolonged time, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. This in turn with my Dilated Cardiomyopathy has made me wary about my health and reasons why I am doing this degree. The travel is a pain and with taking a varied amount of medication, this has made me quite unenergetic and too relaxed.
I had been devising my major sculptural construction for the final exhibition during the Christmas holidays and made mock ups, diagrams and drawings, and, these was shown at the first review of the year. I was given quite a good grading, a 2:1, and that made me feel that I was on the correct path towards the constructions. That is when I was took ill and with experiments with medications, I became erratic. Procastrination and apathy are bad bed fellows. I did continue with my research into Diebenkorn, Polke and Boyce and read books that was in the reader and that kept me active.
I am now on the right track health wise and already started work on the construction piece that I’ll exhibit. I’ve found a whole bunch of business text and these will be used within the construction. I have experiment with media and applications this year that include Polaroid photography, philosophy, plaster and sand, typography, rust, archival art and the idea of forgotten memories.
What I am not happy with is that I didn’t work more with lens based media such as film making and animation. I know we have the software but there isn’t anyone on a tutorial basis to teach us how to use it. This scope of work is a little alien to me and I need to get a grasp with this side of the course because I’ll just miss out on the joy.
I have began a series of paintings that include newspaper headlines and I have began to edit out large portions of data, there are also a series of paintings that included Russian typography and wordings that relate to my photography of demolished, disused places of work and habitats.