Assessment Feedback and Responses | March 2024
I am devising strategies or methods for capturing feedback and using it meaningfully. After the Unit Assessment and Interim Show I feel I am in deep conversation with my work and those around me, not least the tutors of UAL who have taken the time to respond thoughtfully to my efforts on the MA so far. The reflective blog is incredibly useful as a journal and record of my evolving thinking but despite the tags I feel I need a better method for working through my Study Statement and Assessment Feedback. I may go back to large sheets of paper and mind maps…
Below is my feedback and I will be creating responses to it when I have had time to think about it. I am also writing up my responses to the Interim Show and all of the research I did in London alongside the Low Residency.
General Feedback
Through your blog we can see that a really good rhythm of work is emerging – good reading, and a strong commitment to exploring different possible directions.
There are some interesting contrasts at work here – creating and encouraging a type of visual ~continuity~, or a continuous narrative, while at the same time honing your ‘ability to make a ~blunt cut~’. Often times, our memories in isolation are indeed blunt cuts – small pieces, and sometimes this can be frustrating – but if memory is largely the basis of our identity then those pieces come to constitute our ongoing stories. Perhaps with every drawing we make we bring that accumulation of blunt cuts to the moment we make the mark – every time we recall an event or one of those small pieces it changes slightly and *becomes* something else – the direction of the line changes and the lines of the map take us somewhere new.
The shape of the natural landscapes around us today are for the most part a product of the ways in which we have expressed our needs, impulses, beliefs and behaviours over the past several thousand years as a single species – to what extent is our collective grief a product of drawing lines (political: boundaries and borders - containers for land management towards the pursuit of perpetual agricultural and economic growth?)
Thinking on embedding memory in layers of paint – what is that paint made of, and where did it come from? We are excited to see what materials you might potentially identify to work with and test in the field – if you made your own charcoal or birch/bark tar for example to draw with – and maybe drew in the landscape on fabrics or alternate surfaces, to stretch or position for example in a wooded area, a park, or somewhere personal and site-specific in terms of it’s meaning for you, would this produce a different type of ‘trace’?
Overall very well done, you show an excellent willingness to question yourself and not just accept the comfortable options and this is building a solid foundation on which to build and develop your practice.
Key Points for Development
Memory
The nature of memory
Storytelling and narratives in relation to memory
The activity of recall and the mechanisms for altering our experience of memory
Functions of blunt cut and continuous memory narratives
Memory as impression maker, identity definer, sequence coder
Holes in our memory, selectivity, subjectivity
The Shape of the Landscape
Function governs structure
Collective grief and the lines we draw politically and geographically
How is this governed by economic growth
Materials
What paint and drawing tools might I explore to deepen the enquiry around mark making
Substrates
ALSO not included in the feedback but relevant - edges could be more organic, the straight lines are out of keeping with the landscape
Fabrics, other surfaces
General Observations
Feedback is incredibly useful and I am energised by the conversation. I would like more academically rigorous conversations. I am looking forward to the research component of the course in the second year.
The feedback itself is also useful in slightly remodelling the questions as well as validating the questions themselves. I feel motivated to respond to these notes in the studio and in my blog and seek to widen my remit for understanding the subject, materials and processes of my work.