Sophie Ashdown

For my second tutorial with Jonathan, I planned to talk about three key things – my blogs, study statement, and the interim show.

We had a good discussion about the blogs, as I was worried that my blogs are too long and not frequent enough.  That perhaps it would be better to post shorter blogs more often.  Jonathan reassured me that there is no right or wrong way to do the blogs.

The key thing about the blogs is that the key audience is myself.  He asked if what I’m posting is working?  Is it helping me?  I realised that I am using the blogs to describe what I’m doing and thinking, how my art practice is progressing, what I’m learning along the way, and how I feel about it.  And this is what works for me.  This was a really useful conversation because I had felt unsure about whether what I was writing was “correct” for the course, but if it works for me and helps me with my art practice then yes it is “working”.

I have found that writing a blog about each of our Tuesday sessions helps me to digest and consider what was discussed and how I experienced it.  I’ve also found that I will often refer back to my blogs about the Tuesday sessions rather than my notes, because I have already extrapolated what I feel are the most important elements to me.

We talked about the blogs not needing to be “perfect” and it’s okay to publish shorter posts if they are still meaningful to me.  Jonathan suggests that I download the WordPress app on my phone so that I can create posts more quickly and therefore post more often if I choose to.  I have downloaded the app but haven’t used it yet. I’m hoping to use it to post more thoughts as I go, rather than constructing a longer more detailed post each time.

We then discussed the Study Statement, for which I have a draft version but it needs a lot more fleshing out.  I was struggling with the main theme, and wondered if I was getting too specific, which then may limit what I do with it as time goes on.  For example my original idea was to focus on how the original visual style of Constructivism has endured into modern art, while the social/political messages have not.  I would then expect to go into detail about the political side of things to explore how and why those ideals stayed in 1920s Russia but the abstract geometric aesthetic endured.  This sounds like a good idea if the outcome of this course is a long dissertation of written work requiring hundreds of hours of research and tens of thousands of words.

I realised that I wasn’t really taking into account the creative aims of the course.  That the study statement is really a guide to my art practice and feeds into the works I will create over the two year course.  It’s all very well writing long scholarly texts about political messaging, but is that what I’m really interested in?  No it’s not!

Jonathan came right out and asked me what was most important to me about the Constructivist art movement.  It’s not the political ideals, it is the wonderful geometric abstraction, the straight lines, the graphic design, the feel of architecture, the blocks of shapes and colour, etc.  It is the visual style, not the politics that resonates with me.  I realised that I will get far more out of exploring the visual aesthetic of the movement than anything else.  And so will my art practice.

So that was a “whoa” moment.  If I hadn’t discussed it with Jonathan, I might have gone down some rabbit hole of deep political doctrine that didn’t really interest me but I felt I had to do.

What was funny was that we talked about the video we had watched and discussed way back in week five about David Cross and his assertion that all art should be a commentary on the climate crisis.  That spawned the discussion of whether we have a duty as artists to always have some kind of social messaging in our art, for which we came to the conclusion that while it is good to have, that it is not essential.  We should be free as artists to create what we want and to include messaging (or not) as we wish.

We then talked about the interim show, for which I have an idea for what I want to show and how it could be displayed.  This launched into a really interesting discussion about how it could be done, what could work in the space, how it could be put together, and even the merits of different kinds of hole punches!  As a result I am quite excited about my submission for the interim show, but more detail on that will be in another post.  I don’t want to ruin the surprise!

We also spoke about what comes next after the interim show, and what is expected of us as the course goes on.  The most exciting part about what comes next is that it is primarily about putting my art making front and centre.  I am still amazed that I’m doing this course that gives me so much encouragement to just go and create.  Previously I had to carve out time amongst everything else in my world to be able to create my art.  Now I just have to declare that I need to “do some coursework” and I’m free to create as I see fit.  It is incredible freeing and inspiring.

There will eventually be a research paper of about 3-4000 words based around our art practice that should incorporate the aims  and objectives of the Study Statement.  Again this is intended to put our art front and centre, so I am really interested to see how this pans out.  I’m definitely not worried about hitting any word count target as I always seem to go on quite a lot.  (This post alone is over 1000 words – doh!)

So it was another really interesting and useful tutorial with Jonathan.  I came away from it feeling supported, informed, and inspired.