MA Week 40 - Practice 1 : summary of the module

Practice 1: Progress and Reflection

This was a very practical module which had the potential to drift as it was double the length of the previous module in terms of time. It was typified by times of little activity due to personal issues (with the health of both myself and my partner’s elderly mother, both taking a lot of time and energy) and times of intense and enjoyable activity.

It was hard to restart in April but taking a number of photographs of pylons provided some good source material and I was back on track after some drawn monoprints of these. I’d made a conscious decision to try drawn monoprinting as I thought it would loosen up my cramped practice. I was right, and also the pylons have been constants in my source material since then.

As always, pivotal moments come when you least expect them. In early May I did a piece of free writing, about writing, over a monoprint of a pylon. It seemed to settle that the writing and visual were in fact two sides of the same coin. After that I felt like I’d wrestled the writing into its place, and this was confirmed by the points made and discussed at the “Tall Tales and Crooked Yarns” research forum on 15^th June, when artists discussed the use of the visual (as opposed to written) narrative. Also in early May, in a lecture by Adam Stone, he commented to the effect that you are only one actor in the creative process. This statement has kept coming back to me, and was particularly noticeable when I was monoprinting, which I’ll talk about later in this summary.

Etching a drypoint of the pylon around the same time was another key point in this module. This plate built upon the experience of the two plates I’d produced previously within the MA, and I really liked the blackness of the marks I’d made. To no small extent, I think I am learning to draw via drypoint.

For the end of year show, I decided to fall back on that with which I am more familiar, acrylic painting, and produced four abstracts. It was a risk averse strategy as I didn’t know what I could manage in terms of printing. I asked my classmates for a crit which eventually took place via Whatsapp, on the train to the drawing symposium in Salford in May, and in the symposium itself. This plus further prototyping and going back to my trusty “Encyclopedia of Acrylic Painting” meant I was well able to produce the pieces. I used two definite, limited palettes, one based on my usual Socialist black/red and the other a combination of blue/yellow/silver based on pylons under a stormy sky. This set my palette for the rest of the term, which was concerned with printing.

The opening night of the End of Year show was fantastic. Although I was very aware that my work was a definite work in progress, it was such a buzz and so much fun. This was followed by my submission of the postcards to the 1000 secret postcards exhibition in Frome, Somerset. I followed this on Twitter and it was also uplifting, positive and resulted in a few new Twitter connections in the South West. These two events represented steps forward with my professional development.

After the show, I undertook some further planning and an analysis of the time still available to me, and realised I couldn’t do both the acrylic painting and the printing that I would have liked to. I therefore took a conscious decision to concentrate on printing. I started to monoprint using the geometric shapes of the pylons and this is where Adam’s statement about being merely one actor became very apparent. I was led by the loose, visually driven process that is monoprinting. This was exciting and opened up a realisation that creativity can come when you loosen the control, as well as when you exert as much control as possible.

I used the black/red and blue/yellow/silver palettes for the printing work. This followed on from a nascent methodology from the last module, of using a palette which derives from what you’ve seen, and I like this idea. It also tied in with another couple of pivotal moments. Reading Annemarie Murland’s paper, Migration and Sense of Place: re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice, made me realise that you can allow a place to channel itself through your creative practice by your choice (or its choice??) of the colours and marks. I also had a really interesting conversation with my colleague, Dr Liz Watkins, whose research interests include colour. Liz was doing some work on some old photographic images and looking for signs of the embodied experience in which those photographs had been taken. In a Eureka moment, I realised that this is what I’d tried to do with the pylon abstracts. I felt the beginning of a kind of visual language or visual encoding – not necessarily the only visual language in which I might articulate myself – but something which had been brewing since the start of the calendar year in terms of my colour and mark use. This was a very gratifying and exciting moment!

I undertook another urban wandering, to Holbeck, to generate some new source material. Along with monoprinting, I made a new drypoint based on some of the shapes from this wandering and I combined this and the pylon drypoint with some of the monoprinting. I also used some cardboard shapes from the buildings I’d photographed on the wandering as resists and let the whole lot come together. I learnt so much during this time simply from practising the printing. I had the confidence to think what I was going to do rather than just jumping in. The results were much better. One thing I need to learn more about is the paper. One of next year’s objectives will be to learn about paper! Can’t wait! I have become addicted to printing, particularly intaglio.

I have also managed to get an abstract accepted for a symposium called “Grim up North?” on September 16^th this year. I’m really pleased about this as the theme of the conference is right up my street, to use the vernacular, and it is something I’d wanted to do since the outset of the MA but didn’t think I’d be able to. I intend to talk about trying to develop a visual language which describes the embodied experience of being a Northerner, building on the points I made earlier in this summary.

In my MA proposal, my definitive statement of my research topic was ‘to understand in more depth how I can use creative practice to depict experience that is part and parcel of the condition of “being human”’. There were many times along the way this year that I felt I was hopping around, not able to settle on any one thing, miles away from my topic. But really I’ve just been on a few exploratory pathways and I’ve now returned to it in terms of developing a visual language which attempts to describe lived experience (embodied/felt experience).

If I look back through my creative journal for this module, the source and subject material is entirely the urban landscape, and particularly the industrial, landscape (with the exception of a Yorkshire Rose from the Holbeck wandering). I’d not even noticed this - there is actually an unexpected strength of theme. Something noticeable by its absence in this module is my own image, which has hitherto been present in my practice since the Access course days. Whether I have moved on permanently from this, only time will tell, but I think the development of my use of colour and mark is possibly taking over from the need to put myself literally in the picture.

What next?

A week off after hand in to go to York Races! Then back to it. The first task will be to research and produce the paper that I will give at the Symposium on 16^th September. This is equally exciting and terrifying. I hope that that research will form the basis for the research for my dissertation. I haven’t yet finalised a title for the latter but I expect it will encompass some or all of the themes of Northernness, mark making, developing a visual language and urban wandering.

I expect that the dissertation will take up most of the time next term, but if at all possible I want to keep going into the Print Room to try to keep developing my technique. In particular, I want to learn more about etching into a ground on metal and to think about how this could work into the Practice 2 module next year.