Here is my five minute video about Unit 3:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQH7fFCP4cjaUs9btRnUvBg
*Note if there is some trouble loading the video, let me know at srcoady@gmail.com. (It is not always playing correctly!)
Here is the script for the video:
Before starting this MA, I was somewhat lost as an artist.
I had left my corporate career in 2018 to pursue art full time and, on paper, things looked successful. I was exhibiting regularly, completing commissions, and selling work. It felt rewarding to know that my artwork was hanging in people’s homes and businesses in the UK and around the world. But privately I felt disconnected from what I was making and uncertain about who I was as an artist.
I thought being an artist would mean freedom to just spend all of my time creating. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by administration, social media, client management and the pressure to constantly produce work that would sell.
I also carried a lot of self-doubt.
By 2022 I was a single mother working part-time in the music industry while trying to sustain an art practice that no longer felt creatively fulfilling. If anyone asked what I did I would say that I’m trying to be an artist.
During my divorce, my ex-husband’s barrister said to me:
“Let’s face it Sophie – you don’t have an art career. You never have and you never will.”
That statement was designed to hurt me, and it did. But it also gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
When I was accepted onto this MA, it felt significant because, for the first time in many years, I was doing something purely for myself.
Before the course, my work was mainly large abstract paintings influenced by Constructivism: geometric, ordered and highly structured. I worried that I was too rigid in my approach, and I hoped the MA would somehow teach me to become more instinctive and “free”.
Early in the course I became very aware of how differently other artists seemed to think and work. Through tutorials, group work, and conversations, I often felt that I was somehow approaching art incorrectly: I was too analytical, too systematic, too technical.
But over time I began to realise that my way of thinking was not a weakness.
I think in patterns, grids, repetition and systems. I naturally move between technical and creative thinking at the same time. Initially I resisted this because I believed “real” artists should be less structured. However, the course gradually helped me understand that this duality is actually central to my practice.
During the MA I have experimented with new processes including monochrome ink drawings, expanded sculptural thinking, and increasingly conceptual approaches to making. At the interim show, I became fascinated not only by the works of art themselves but by the stories and experiences behind them. I realised that context could transform how work is understood emotionally.
This became especially important during my research project.
My paper explored data as a viable artistic material, linking contemporary data art with echoes of Constructivist geometry and industrial aesthetics. Initially I worried that the subject was “not artistic enough”, but the research ultimately gave me permission to recognise that data, systems and structure are not separate from my artistic identity — they are part of it.
That research then began feeding directly into my studio practice.
For my final major project, I am creating a body of work based on personal data and lived experience. I’m transforming aspects of my own life into visual, tactile and sensory forms. Rather than using detached or universal datasets, I became interested in autobiographical data like memory, relationships, music, geography, communication, ethics and sensory perception.
The work is still evolving, but for the first time my practice feels genuinely aligned with who I am.
What has changed most over these two years is not simply the work itself, but my relationship to myself as an artist.
I began this course believing I needed to escape my instinct towards order and structure so that I could become more free. Instead, I have discovered a different kind of freedom entirely: freedom from self-judgement, freedom from external validation, and freedom to fully embrace the way I think and how I make work.
I no longer feel the need to separate the technical and creative sides of myself.
They coexist.
And perhaps most importantly, I no longer say:
“I’m trying to become an artist.”
I can finally say:
“I am an artist.”
Sophie Ashdown 