Assessment Visual Enquiry 1:1 and Professional Context 1:2

Overall Feedback

-solid consistent practice that takes risks, involves sophisticated ideas and awareness of potential viewers.  

- the new work seems riskier, more raw, more personal.

- have taken on the responsibility of student representative liaising well with
student and staff, engaged regularly with LMS.

Areas to develop

-work with hands and frames; simplifying both conceptually and materially.

-think about what the finished work is and how you want your audience to relate to it.

-carry on developing your practice between your two areas of concern; the
informed critical practitioner versus the raw “outsider”.
 
Visual Enquiry and Research Methods

 
Informal Assessment

 
You have shown an elegant and sophisticated response to the studio projects, and demonstrated a solid sense of how your practice might develop including
ambitious ideas for the future, e.g. an intervention at the V & A.

You know what your medium is and are able to focus on producing work that
satisfies you, yet continues to ask questions of you.

Don’t forget to ask yourself the obvious questions – it may be helpful to try
writing about your work in a very prosaic way, it might reveal something useful.

The work produced for the Mapping the Territory project was conceptually playful and aesthetically successful, demonstrating your strengths. You have a fine sense of the oblique, which was used to great effect in this project.
Unfortunately, your critical reflection and contextualising of your practice in
this project was lacking.

Formal Assessment

Mapping the Territory 57%

Professional Context

Informal Assessment

 
You have submitted a thorough overview of the work of the Koestler Trust from
the perspective of a volunteer working with the processing, judgement and
journeys of artworks made by prisoners.

Through your study and experience you raise a number of interesting points – the value judgement of art, fashions in contemporary gallery hanging styles, the notion of the amateur and professional artist, the relationship between art and life amongst others. In relation to some of these points, you offer your own views, however bringing in a wider view – from theorists or curators for example would have been a beneficial addition. Furthermore, more references to artists work – contemporary and past – would have enriched the study. Please include a bibliography in future submissions.

The visual responses are intriguing. Bringing a random element into your work,
through something outside your control, does, as you say, let imbalances and new relationships occur. This has resulted in some dynamic visual results, which, if taken forward into your moving image work will give the potential for new ways of visual thinking.

This is a fair submission that gives an insight into another facet of the
artworld however ensure your writing is positioned within the wider context of
art writing and theory.

Formal Assessment

55%

Reflection

I have discovered yet more confusion about submission, especially for Mapping the Territory – it seems my web links to my processes and context were not assessed, such as they were. There was actually no word count or limit to this project, so as well as submitting the finished piece, I had submitted all other material listed on my blog.

Even so, I guess I am little underwhelmed by my own performance. I don’t think I had quite grasped to submit a specific bibliography other than scrupulous web links and referencing, which I had done as I went along on the blog. I don’t think I saw these projects as formal as they really were – I thought process and creativity and my own thoughts were the point. I can see that I could well have spread my net wider in referencing other curators, writers, etc. I think I was compartmentalising this and expected more formality to be placed within the upcoming essay projects. I have related these projects to myself and my practice rather than particularly the art world.

(If I can also secretly say that I have found some of my fellow MA blogs full of references, but unfiltered – just things come across or interesting. Personally, I find that cluttering – I will doggedly continue only referencing and mentioning other artists, etc, through reflection, always editing through the self. Filling the MA blog journey with other artists or writers thoughts isn’t the point, is it?)

I have felt quite restricted in Mapping, as I have well documented, and would have been alot happier with more interpretation possible, and Mapping taken more as a starting point, and creativity lead.

As for practical work, I don’t agree that frames and hands are riskier, more raw and personal than previous work. On the contrary, although I can see that they have some qualities of immediacy, and although I have found it valuable and fruitful for ideas, I do not feel that I have reached parts of my artistic intention nearly as much as other Moving Image work. I think this is because in my “own” work, everything is my own invention to fit – the technique, the subject, the method, and so on. I ask and answer my own question, and link everything I can to my deepest intention. Of course I hope to integrate as much as possible into any project, including MA projects, but I feel a little removed from my true artistic self in a MA or “imposed” assignments, and that the work has a little less authenticity or meaning to myself. I feel I was rigorous but within limitations.

Overall I’m still delighted to be doing the MA, and have found it a valuable focus for my artistic plans. It has made some things come to fruition or seem more doable than before. For plans and ideas, it makes the time now.

Angela and I have reassessed your mapping the territory project and have agreed 62% -  the mark would have been a bit higher if you had produced more contextual research and reflection.

Angela will discuss this with you in your tutorial next week.

Whilst there was a misunderstanding on this occasion please be aware that presentation is also part of the professional context of an MA.
In future you must make sure you send very clear web links to everything you
want assessed.

Also please be aware that we have constraints of time so there is a need to edit your work for specific projects.
I hope this is a satisfactory resolution to you

Post post script – happy that my work has now been somewhat reassessed and mark amended. Plenty to do, plenty to do better in the future. More and more context seems to be the key. Personally I find this a little more of a distraction that exploring my own thoughts. I never could run out of internal lists of art to imagine and make.

19th July 2011