Critical Reflection

​

I decided to keep the blindfold, plinth and headphone idea but alter or add my own thing to it to develop the idea more. I really wanted to keep the blindfold becasue one thing I have been thinking a lot about this term is that my work is so concerned with process and how do I translate that to an audience? I feel like it is such an important aspect to what I do that can get lost really easily unless you have time to explain the ideas etc. so I have worked subtle ways into my work this time around that give a hint to what the process involved to create the SOT drawings. I feel like a hint is enough for the audience to know. So this is why I was sure I wanted to keep the blindfold - becasue I create my drawings by eliminating sight. Building on this thought about translating the creative process to the audience, I decided to add a new element which is the crushed shells on top with a sign saying 'The crushed shells are here for you to create your own marks'. This was purposefully written in such a way that it leaves the option open to draw your own marks in the shells or not. I am not bothered if people do or don't make marks while they listen to the piece - I guess that is part of the nature with audience interaction, some people are more responsive than others, and that is totally fine.

​

Another point about the layout (as well as being another attempt to spereate my work from Alison Carlier's), I decided to display the drawings. However, they are very seperate from the main focus, the sound piece. If I was to control the layout more for this space, I would have the drawings in a different section/room to the sound piece, but still connected so that they would be consecutive in their viewing. Also, they give a slight insight to what the spoken text is referring to.

​

Something else I have noticed towards the end of this process after all the writing up is that there is this interesting tension between tangible and intangible. The drawings obviously involved a tactile approach, but through contemplation of the use of phenomenology in my process and the realisation of an object as mental phenomena, it naturally led me in a direction of focussing on an immaterial way to present my work. Also, becasue I didn't feel happy with the traditional way of presenting drawings as objects hung on a wall, this seemed to be a perfect solution as a way to develop and take drawing out of its pre-conceived context.

​

One of the most useful pieces of advice from Rebecca in office hours once was that concepts don't have to be water tight so that there is room left for the audience to decipher what they can from the work. I feel like there is a sense of this ambiguity, but different elements interlink if you can give time to think about what each different part is related to. Another important point to make is about the use of philosophy within my process. I mentioned it before in the blog post about Joe Graham's drawings, but I want to re-emphasise that the drawings are not contrived by philosophy, they are created through subjective experience and that has is what has been influenced by phenomenology; the thinking, not the drawing.

​