Sophie Ashdown

After many many drafts of my evidence for the Unit 3 assessment, I managed to post it in the nick of time earlier today.

I tried to keep the assessment focussed on the blog posts I have created during Unit 3 (since January) but I also did reference some posts from earlier where relevant, mostly for Learning Objective 1 which was about the body of work created over the time of the course.

I find the process of doing the assessment to be challenging and rewarding in equal measure.

It is challenging to do this process because first I have to fully understand each of the objectives to then find evidence for the criteria. Some of the language in the official objectives is difficult to interpret but thankfully Jonathan had helped us with that with further explanations. Still, that was my first task to create the criteria I think I needed to measure myself against.

Then of course it is going through all of the blogs to try to find that evidence and relate it to the relevant objective. Often one blog post can have elements of all three objectives. When this happens I need to then have three different explanations for how that post matches with each objective.

The process is also rewarding because it gives me time to reflect on my full journey as an artist through the time of this course. I surprised myself by how many blogs I had written and also how personally revealing some of them are. Prior to this course I would not have revealed my thoughts and feelings so openly, but I recognise now how helpful this has been as part of my progress.

So now all of my effort will be on creating the different elements of my end of year show piece. I know that it is very ambitious to try to create all of the different parts to it, but I work well under pressure so we’ll see how many I get done.

I am really looking forward to the show and also to seeing many of my course-mates.

But after submitting the assessment today I’m going to reward myself with a rare evening off to enjoy a glass of wine and relax!