Summative Evaluation

What a module!

I really focussed on making it my main mission with this module to make work that took on a more serious tone from my regular work. It, wasn’t necessarily hard to do when it came to my attitude and concepts, but actually executing said concepts and coming up with further work was really difficult for me. So much so that I spent a good 2 weeks pulling blanks. It was then that I found three different methods to overcoming this artist block that in tandem really helped me get on a track that led to me creating some of the strongest pieces I have made to date.

The techniques that helped me where; Distraction, Research and Powering through. At first spending a week away from this module doing other work allowed me to stop fixating on making something that reflected the seriousness of the tragic plays and poems I chose from Shakespeare. However after a week I was still stuck and going back left me extremely frustrated, so I focussed my time between researching artists who have tackled similar subjects in a way I wished my work to go and dissecting the 1 play and 1 narrative poem i’d chosen to do. Armed with a sack of information I forced myself to make a tone of work, the good the bad and mostly the ugly came out of all the work i’d make and through one on one, group and self intimated peer critiques I was able to successfully reflect back on my work and decide what worked and what didn’t.

A big part go this module for me has been forcing my self in both formal and informal situations to reflect back on my work. I try to answer a series of questions in my head to work out the how successful the work is. Is it relevant? Does it say what I want it to say? Could the idea be refined and taken further? What standard of work are we going to be seeing at the end of it’s refinement?

This kind of thinking helped me become more deceive with my work, which meant that 1/3 of the way through this module I knew that I would have to focus on only one piece of work By Shakespeare as I knew before hand that I didn’t wan to focus on Him personally as I have no interest in him but more in his, more controversial works. Although the Rape of Lucrece held a lot of depth to it, Othello’s struggle with his blackness really resonated with me and I felt I could approach his struggle in a more abstract and sensitive way as I understand his conflict better.

Initial ideas for Othello ended up informing the way I went about my final product. I asked a 1st year to pose as Othello for me and he asked me who Othello was. A few others did this too. This would later go on to inform the way I made my book as an almost brief plot summary of Othello. I learnt from this how discussions with people can help later inform your work.

When it came to after effects and the sting, I didn’t find it too frustrating. After hashing out and gaining a solid foundation of what my concepts and imagery for the publication I knew what it  was going to look like. In that knew I wanted to focus more on the idea of creating a shortened narrative within the sting using sound.  Because Shakespeare's work was most powerful spoken i decided to record myself performing some shakespeare. As a result of this I learnt the importance of making shut you are clear and pronounced within your work after re-recording the sound bite later.  

The importance of scamps has never left me and was a godsend for this project as i ended up doing hundreds in the effort to create images that maximised the potential of the scene the needed to depict.

I learnt about visual noise and how that can effect the impact of an image on the viewer. I tried to keep this in mind with all my prints however I know if I’d have spent more time thinking about composition and symbolism 2 of the prints could have been better. 

The hard backing of the books was important to me as it made me realise that I was starting to think more about the finished standard of my work rather than just churning out content.

If I were to do anything differently next time it would be, blog more consistently and spend more time on developing the prints as a series not just individually. 

But overall I feel good about this module. It helped me become more conscience of what my end product would be and what kind of standard I wanted my work to be at.