This post is for my UNIT 3 assessment of MA Fine Art:Digital at Central Saint Martins
Present evidence of a body of work that demonstrates a systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding. (AC Realisation)
This course has been like a cocoon for me, one that’s held me throughout a process of not knowing, of not needing to know and of discovery through the act of trying my hardest not to care what others think. Jonathan mentioned at the beginning to use the first unit as experiments, to not be afraid to investigate, I took this as a nod to try, fail, get up, move, change, burn, throw things, wonder and make make make. I was terrified that I was using so many different mediums, so many different styles and didn’t know where any of it was going, but for the first time ever I trusted and let it unfold in front of me.
I have noticed as I have reflected on my blog and the pieces I have created, that although I felt like I wasn’t being led somewhere at times, parts of my current practice in Unit 3 were emerging throughout my experimentation without me knowing. I have labeled each part indented in bold, with the seed that has now bloomed into my current practice and process.
At the beginning of the course I had lost a lot of connection to my previous confidence and creative vision. I felt very confused in who I was as an artist or creative, a lot of my belief in myself came from being connected to or hiding behind a commercial brand as an Art Director. When I created personal work, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I’d always been proud of my taste and what I knew, but couldn’t feel settled in my own artistic practice.
This was evident in the way I first presented my blogs, lists of music, film and ‘inputs’ as I called them, that I was engaging in everyday. I told myself at the time I was doing this because I had no rhythm to my day, which was partially true. I was trying anything to find that rhythm again and one of the ways I was doing it was to give myself structured lists of things to do, even if that was things to watch or listen to. But I also think there was something deeper going on, I could show what I enjoyed with ease, what inspired me, but I was still afraid to show what I made. Afraid it wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t live up to the image of myself I had in my own head.
I do however look back and applaud that version of myself for finding some way to pull myself out of chaos and give myself something to focus on and do, a structure. A way to feed my creative mind when I was feeling too scared to explore it.
Here’s an example of that structure I gave myself, that I clung onto, and on reflection, help me to quickly get into the habit of blogging. Something I’m very proud to say I feel incredibly natural with now, it is an obvious extension of when I create work.
I realised something that was plaguing me, even though I knew it to be completely untrue and embedded from a young age when art was presented to me as only painting or drawing. I didn’t feel comfortable with painting and therefore that inner child part of me felt like I wasn’t an artist. I decided, as a fun experiment, to challenge myself to do it. I painted ‘that picture’ the one kids paint, the tree, the sky, the ground so that I could directly challenge that part of me. I worked on it for many days in a row, making myself stare at it in the room I slept in. Sit with it, hate it, love it, change it to be more me, add meaning, take meaning away.
I was using this piece as a way to truly face my fears, almost exposure therapy. If I could survive this I could maybe become more comfortable in the art that I create after and lose the critical voice. Have fun, express how I want to. And again, it helped me to keep plugging away at SOMETHING. Jonathan had told us to use Unit 1 as an experiment, and this was my experiment. Could I survive my own ego? Could I withstand the idea that others may see this piece developing day by day, a piece I wasn’t in love with? Could I withstand potential judgements?
An important part of my inquiry became whether I could pull myself from the grasp of digital image making programmes (Procreate, Adobe illustrator, Indesign) that I had previously used to realise my ideas. Stripping away the mediums that had become a crutch meant I had to start finding process within craft in order to realise my ideas and concepts.
I had two different roads to take at the beginning of this course, my usual route of perfection, comfort, sitting in a place that made me look capable OR completely going rogue and trying all the things that scared me. I chose the second.
My current practice now uses paint as its main medium
I began to look, really look around myself. I live in a beautiful place and I find it very apt that the videos I took back then were rather dreary. This has over the course of the two years became a huge part of my practice, looking outwards, capturing the nature and environment around me, walking through it and being inspired by it. It had begun to creep in at the beginning of my experimentation albeit with a different mood.
I now use video to capture elements the environment around me
Slowly the ‘inputs’ I was using to inspire me were starting to promote action in my body towards creative outputs. William Kentridge’s ‘Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ inspired me to start using charcoal, his voice overs also stuck with me. His way of speaking and acting in his film. That wouldn’t begin to emerge until later in my work.
I use charcoal within my scrolls alongside acrylics
Again I stuck to painting, combining my knowledge of digital graphics with hands-on painting. Slowly I was applying what I knew from the world of digital art and art direction to painting. It wasn’t perfect but it was beginning to express my ideas. I had felt spineless and weak after an abusive relationship and this directly and literally expressed that feeling. I was in a very literal place at times.
As a continuation of taking myself out of adobe illustrator and procreate I sketched, and again, I sketched the things I found the hardest- faces. This MA gave me a very safe place as someone who was supposed to be seen as ‘competent’ to do all the things I was afraid of. The bits I didn’t feel 100% comfortable with. A place to be vulnerable.
Developing my drawing through the Royal Drawing School course has enhanced my current practice greatly
I gave myself the structure of creating a piece everyday for a week, and some small, graphic-like paintings came out of it. They felt sweet and sickly. I liked them. But immediately I felt trapped by their style. Trapped by their form.
I began using canvas and acrylic to express my love for topics I would become obsessed with. The painting below inspired by the Voynich Manuscript. Something I had researched for hours. I was slowly discovering that something that held my creative expression together wasn’t necessarily a medium or a style (yet) but an interest, a topic that I want to dive deeper into through the act of creating.
I explore topics that I want to deep dive through my current work
I was journalling everyday and wanted to use this to go back to a practice I had previously done through my BA at London College of Communication, writing, singing and recording. Through this piece I was purposefully getting back in touch with that version of myself. I knew I was a lot freer, excited and less bogged down by ‘right and wrong’. I thought that maybe writing songs again could help me find some of her energy. I was right.
My interim show pieces were about autoimmune disease, rage, expectations of women and physical craft. Now I look at them from where I am currently. They were also about smashing up what I was telling myself ‘art’ was supposed to be. Damaging canvases and using embroidery with not a lick of paint.
It was partially cathartically breaking the rules but also breaking open a space to start playing with mediums, materials and surfaces in a different way. It was the start of me seeing canvas itself as a material/textile you can paint on and not just a painting surface, which is now integral to my practice.
I now use canvas as a deconstructed textile to sew and shape
Again, my environment was creeping in. Long walks up hills near to where I live had the usual rhythm of photo taking. That was already an incredibly natural process for me, but now I was using ink to then draw and observe what I had seen.
My environment and the walks I take deeply inform my current work, I directly paint species and nature from my environment
As John Berger famously says: Women watch themselves being looked at. Before I wrote this poem, my internal monologue was had mostly be echoes from a past relationship. After the poem, I could hear my own voice again and was no longer observing my own movements and choices through his mind.
This not only released a lot of self doubt, but showed me JUST how powerful my self expression could be in releasing me from pain. I integrated this into my practice whenever creativity became hard or blocked.
Along with writing and recording I was beginning again to experiment with yarn, I’d previously made full garments but never experimented in my artistic practice. This also then developed into the idea of using yarn and code together, embedding code into yarn itself. This was the first bud of me starting to acknowledge technology as an area of exploration. Technology had been a place I had dramatically pulled myself out from in my art in order to force myself to use my hands in my work. It was also something I was becoming more and more interested in expressing through physical craft. A topic the world around me was questioning, fearful of and actively discussing a length during 2024/2025. I was beginning to not only look around at my environment physically, but philosophically and theoretically as well.
My work now expresses different elements of technology through physical craft, introducing yarn and elements of my garment making practice into my art practice, led to me exploring canvas as a medium that I could shape through sewing
As an extension of looking around, being inspired by my environment and exploring with video, I created ‘Dark, Light,Dark, Light’ combining my writing, voice work, video and exploration of nature all together. This was an avenue I continued to want to explore and one Jonathan had encouraged me to continue with.
I create video pieces that capture my environment whilst expressing and researching how we interact with technology
During this process I had begun to move between different environments, Wales and Birmingham, which was affecting the way I was seeing my practice and how I was interacting with the world in general. Up until this point I had been trapped without a car in the middle of nowhere and suddenly I was in touch with the city again. The two very different environments reminded me of the vast difference between my practice using technology and my practice using more hands-on craft. The city felt technological and countryside more connected to knitting, sewing, drawing and painting. These splits started to emerge in my work.
My work now acknowledges and expresses this juxtaposition between city and countryside, technology and craft
My print for the Illustrators fair and Coal Drops yard sale began to explore these themes. Specifically AI, this feeling I was realising everyone around me was beginning to express. The overwhelming feeling that technology was becoming ‘bigger’ than us and was showing us this stark reality that we’re all just human. ‘You are just human’ is used as a term to make people feel better, to make them realise they can be flawed. All of a sudden it was becoming the very thing that was making them scared. They’re ‘just’ human up against machine.
My work now explores unsettling issues with how we view or are affected by new technologies
During my research paper I began to explore mark-making as code, whilst also using the process of the piece itself to deal with any stress I had from writing the research paper. I created the pieces during the writing process to implement the paper’s main idea, that the need for repetitive process is inherent in us all and can be fulfilled through artistic practices. I did this alongside acknowledging how technology can also fulfil this need and not always to our benefit, posing that perhaps, utilising repetitive and ritualistic artistic practices can help to pull us away from actions like doomscrolling.
The first expressions of bringing the digital world out into the physical came in the form of projecting the digital scroll onto trees around my house. I wanted to take something that is usually a solo and isolating act and give it oxygen by displaying it out in the open. This project is still ongoing as there are many technical aspects to tackle. It’s also one I intend to use to travel around natural areas, not only projecting on trees, but waterfalls, rocks, caverns and lakes having the natural landscapes distort the projection.
UNIT 3
At the beginning of unit 3 I began to allow myself back towards digital drawing. In the beginning my pull away from this medium had been so that I could truly explore physical craft without leaning on a crutch but I didn’t want this to become an aversion.
Below are a few illustrations I did on procreate. I was inspired to come back to this after creating the print for the Editions print sale at the illustrators fair.
By the beginning of this unit I had formed my ideas about material usage, medium and the topic that I wanted to explore more deeply. I’d written my research paper around repetition and how that relates to addictive actions like scrolling through online video. Out of this came the scrolls. A way to explore the vertical nature of online video, slow degradation over time through the use of cotton and acrylic, allowing the viewer to scroll and unscroll the piece, meaning they must get up close and experience it tangibly much like the phone. I wanted to create pieces that were slow, manual and intricate, a true opposite of the immediacy of the current digital world.
Part of my learning from Unit 1 and also from my research paper taught me that part of my artistic practice was to create in order to deal with overwhelm and to express difficult emotions when they come up. During the course, issues and tragedies that were happening across the globe began to affect my course mates and it became something very difficult to watch happen to people that have been so kind, genuine and supportive during this process. I turned to pastel to quickly express myself.
I also was still facing some health challenges during this time, and began reflecting on my journey with my health condition as a whole, allowing the work and reflection to help me process through some of these emotions that get brought up again each time my condition flares up. This particular exploration was inspired by visiting the Tracey Emin exhibition on the low residency. Seeing another artist so honestly display and talk about having stoma, inspired me to go back to doing the same. Most of my work doesn’t directly talk about this, but my need to create and make is heavily linked to the pain and trauma I have experienced over time with Crohns Disease.
In the feedback from Unit 2, Jonathan had mentioned using my voice within my video works and also that I seemed to work best when a piece wasn’t laboured or measured but was freely created in the spur of the moment. I experimented further with video work of my surrounding environment, exploring our need to ask questions, combining the frame of Chat GPTs ‘ask anything’ box over nature, a source we used to visit when we needed answers. I wasn’t too happy with the visual aesthetic, it felt trite and echoed tumblr visuals from the early 2010s which wasn’t what I was going for.
This then evolved into a video exploring the mesmerising nature of technology; I wanted something unbiased, that acknowledged that technology can be beautiful to us, one of the many reasons we are so drawn to it. Using natural sounds from filming, audio interpretations of the haptics from Chat GPT, liquid silicon, computer chips and the landscape of Wales, I created a piece that questions this tension. This is when I started to see my body of work truly begin to become coherent.
In one of my 1-1s with Jonathan at the beginning of the course he gave me the idea of creating an ephemeral sculpture in the landscape around me. Due to my health and various other factors, I had not yet explored this avenue, I had also not yet felt any of my ideas had yet married up to this medium. However after exploring ‘Non-Things’ by Byung Chul Han in my research paper and subsequently wanting to express this concept it felt like the perfect time. Non-things are inherently ephemeral.
Taking the pieces I created during my research paper, I turned them into digital prints that capture my shadow, exploring language as code and digitisation of the self.
I began really looking at the vertical nature of our interactions online, the repetitive behaviours we have and the physical movements of scrolling translating them into physical scrolls that bring our habits out into the physical world using natural elements from my local environment.
The handles are made from Welsh Foraged wood. Using acrylic on cotton canvas, the scrolls themselves are built to degrade over time, emulating the effect overuse of social media consumption can have on our minds.
The use of materials came from my new understanding of canvas as a textile, and paint as a method of drawing after learning techniques on the 10 week course I attended at the Royal Drawing School.
The scrolls are now an integral part of my practice and exploration of the digital world. In order to truly bring them out of the digital space and into the physical, I photographed the pieces in the place they are inspired by.
Synthesise and critically reflect coherently on your process whilst providing evidence of an active, independent and/or collaborative practice. (AC Process)
Questions I have asked myself throughout this course:
Who am I as a creative?
I began wondering who I was as a creative and artist after pigeon holing myself into my career as an Art Director. Over time, when developing the skills needed to realise my ideas for myself, I became an Artist AND Art Director. Both exist simultaneously for me now and one no longer dampens the other.
Do I need to have a style to feel like an artist?
I have concluded that I don’t need a style, that was my branding and advertising mind speaking. However I do need a focus, and my focus has become technology, craft, painting and videography. As I repeat my process with the scrolls, an anchored and recognisable art style is taking shape.
How do I make, what is my process?
I paint, draw, sew, knit, mold and film.
How can I create an environment that I will sit still in and make?
I thought this would be a clean space, a desk, a studio. It ended up being a drawing board on my desk and a portable drawing board that I take out with me. This is where my brain knows it is time to create, whatever that thing may be.
What makes me the most scared and can I do it anyway?
That I will forever perpetually be a ‘thinker’ and not a ‘doer’, I have proven myself wrong on this Masters Degree.
How do I work around my health issues in a way that enhances my work?
I work from bed sometimes, make sure I rest, implement healthy habits that only enhance my creativity and therefore the work that I do. I take inspiration from Tracey Emin’s ‘Boffice’ and Frida Kahlo’s bed easel. Illness does not have to stop me.
Where is the thread that keeps me interested in what I am doing?
Exploring topics deeply and opening up conversation through my work
Where am I being overly critical and where do I truly need to improve?
I have been overly critical of the fast nature of creating within some aspects of my process. It makes it harder to critically reflect because I don’t always know where the idea came from, it just did. I have learnt to embrace that part of my process whilst developing my abilities within slow and thought through craft.
How much of my process is fluid and how much is structured?
Certain projects are laboured and thought through such as the scrolls, other projects are more fast moving and of the moment, such as the video pieces I create. I let ideas unfold when and how they want to.
Why do I become paralysed?
When I think of the outcome over the process. This course has taught me to focus deeply on process and to let the outcome show itself to me over time.
Why can’t I stick to one thing?
I can stick to one thing but I have so much to explore and that is not a bad thing.
What effect has pulling myself out of the digital had on my practice?
It’s taken away the aid that was preventing me from exploring further, from combining my ‘personal’ love for craft with my professional love for art and art direction. Pulling myself out of the digital world and means of creating has enhanced my knowledge not only in fine art but also digital creation itself.
PROCESS
My process is greatly affected by my Crohns Disease, working around that has led me to a place where I can adapt and change how I create each piece depending on my physical health. I also realised during this MA that elements of my psychological response to discipline and habits have come from the unpredictable nature of having a severe chronic and unpredictable condition. I explore this further in my blog post below.
My process varies between mediums. Painting and sewing the scrolls has developed over an iterative process; questioning, reflecting and developing. I first decide the inspiration for the scroll, the theme and the natural element I will be depicting, this then has an effect on the length of the scroll, which I create a cardboard pattern for and cut to size.
Once I do this, I gesso each piece using transparent gesso and hang to dry. Over time I have begun to do this in batches as it is getting easier to predict how many pieces I will be working on at a time.
Then I masking tape the canvas to the drawing board, masking off 1 cm around the edges for the hem. This gives me a structure for the fluid nature of my practice. Here I feel freer and allow creativity to fully take over. I use it as a structure, a framework, a place to hold the chaos. I begin with a thin layer as the background, originally using acrylics and more recently moving to charcoal and pastels.
I paint each element as I go, abstracting the form in whatever way comes to me as I go down the scroll.
I then sew the hems of the scrolls, and add in the handles with a curved needle. At first I tried to sew the handles in with a straight needle but quickly realised how difficult it was to sew this way. The curved needle helps to aim the needle in the correct direction and I’ve also begun using pliers to help pull it through multiple layers.
Before starting each scroll I have two methods of preparation, experiment with different mediums to express the images I am depicting, getting used to the shape and form of what I will be representing before putting it on canvas.
I also spend a lot of time scrolling through videos in my bed; I want to truly feel the effects a few days before I start to create. To feel the real difference between being absorbed in social media and then subsequently being absorbed in craft.
Below are some of the experiments I did before painting the scrolls.
Once the scroll is painted I then varnish with satin varnish and begin the sewing process
Some experiments haven’t lived up to expectations, which has become part of the process itself. In the post below I had originally tried a larger and wider scroll with acrylic inks to emulate trees. The fluidity of the inks felt too uncontrollable and the size of the scroll made the piece lose its reference to verticality. I then moved to oil based relief inks and lino cut printing directly onto the scrolls. I also decided to change the subject to rare butterflies native to Llanymynech rocks near my studio.
When it came to video, my process was a lot more conceptual. I would come up with an idea I wanted to express and then find the materials to do so, bringing them together and filming them to express the concept.
ACTIVE
During Unit 3 I was interviewed about my work by the Founder of an AI research company, discussing how new technologies can potentially affect creativity in the future and how my work looks at the digital world through physical craft. We are still in active discussion and dialogue.
I am also now a member of Seen Collective, a collective of women with tech, science, art, architecture, film and AI research backgrounds. I talk with many of the experts in these fields to continue to enhance my knowledge and discover new themes and ideas through dialogue and discussion.
I have been finding ways to display the scroll at the Final Year show, mainly by using children’s play blocks as a means of giving them fluid form. The play blocks are a nod to physical childhood play vs ipad usage. Another point of contention in the discussion of new tech.
In order to tackle some issues surrounding balancing my idea of the ‘sacred art work’ whilst also making it accessible I have been thinking about and planning creating a performance piece that combines actively scrolling on a phone, and then rolling up and rolling out the scrolls themselves.
I’m currently working on the third scroll using lino print and exploring a large piece combining four different vertical pieces that create a disjointed image.
Summarise and evaluate your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development. (AC Communication)
I used my five minute video as a way to look forward and present myself externally beyond the MA as an artist and as an introduction to my work. It encapsulates my current work, thoughts and explorations along with what I am moving towards. Below I summarise the process of what I did in order to get to this place during the Masters Degree:
I began as an Art Director, that’s who I was in my mind. Someone who could oversee other artists and makers. Who could create huge projects, installations and designs professionally… but only with the help of others. I didn’t know my own voice yet beneath the branded work.
During Unit 1 I threw myself into all the mediums I had ever been interested in, especially the ones that made me feel the most uncomfortable. I looked out at my environment, found topics that interested me to create work about and discovered that I loved to research not only through reading and writing, but through creating. I learnt through the process that I do actually love painting, that there were areas to develop and become more confident in and that as someone who has worked conceptually in advertising agencies since I was 16, that I loved to create around a topic or theme. That was my ‘red thread’ through my work. I became more comfortable with the fact I loved using many different kinds of ways to express myself on one central exploration
My experimentation pulled out a few different things:
My relationship to my environment
Capturing my environment through drawing, painting and video
Deconstructing canvases into textiles
Using paint and charcoal as medium
My interest in exploring new technologies through physical craft
Video, sound and voice work as a part of my practice
The need for rhythm and structure
By Unit 2, I had discovered some of the main elements that were slowly forming my practice. Training at the Royal Drawing School had meant I’d bought a drawing board, which has now become the place I sit at that gets me creating. I had begun creating pieces about technology, exploring elements of this in my research paper, along with repetition in relation to doomscrolling and mark making. The ingredients had been formed in Unit 1 and I was beginning to mix them together now. At the end of my Unit 2 video I was mentioning the scroll work I wanted to start to explore.
In Unit 3 I was fully immersed in my new process, I was cutting, painting and sewing the scrolls, using elements of my environment such as welsh foraged wood as the handles, and using the place I lived to express these questions I had around new technology rather than just capturing or depicting it.
I have now developed a rhythm where it feels very natural to get up everyday and begin work. Mornings usually consist of either gessoing a layer into canvas, cutting canvas to size or sewing hems. Afternoons consist of walks around the countryside taking photographs or video, followed by painting or drawing. My exploration of art itself being a ritualistic practice in both creation and output has given me the deep knowledge on how important structure and rhythm is to my work, both within its theme and in its creation. It would be remiss to not mention the fact that my practice has also expanded my attention and taken me away from the addictive pull of doomscrolling, a habit that I had acquired during long periods of ill health.
The scrolls themselves have developed over the course of Unit 3. I found between the first and second scroll a desire to increase size, use different mediums such as charcoal as the background, and to experiment with a longer piece to really get across the idea of the continuous scroll. Elements such as how I sewed in the scroll handles changed due to realising I’d slightly obscured the painting on the first scroll. I am now beginning the third scroll, and have moved to printing with Lino on the background, and am exploring a size in the middle of the two already created scrolls. The process of exploration before each scroll led to new ideas of material uses, brought up issues such as ink leaking through masking barriers and informed where I would go next in terms of the subject to paint and represent.
During this course I have:
- Learnt to think through materials rather than branding/communication
- Allowed ambiguity instead of clarity
- Developed a slower process
- Shifted from audience persuasion to critical engagement
- Become comfortable with unresolved experimentation
- Discovered recurring conceptual concerns through making
- Formed a rhythm and documentation of my process
The MFA became a period of transition from a commercially-oriented creative practice into a sustained studio-based artistic practice. Early works were intentionally exploratory and materially diverse, reflecting an active search for an appropriate visual and conceptual language. Through this process, recurring concerns around digital spectatorship, physical interaction, repetition, and environmental observation gradually emerged and became consolidated within later works.
MOVING FORWARD
I am now in continuous contact with industry professionals in the technology industry and I am working towards an interdisciplinary project with an AI research company who are very interested in collaborating. They recently published an article in the Financial Times that exposes the limitations of AI and I’m excited at the idea of exploring further with a company that’s actively questioning the technology despite being funded by the very industry that is promoting it.
I’m applying to a residency at British School at Rome to further explore the digital world through physical craft through recession, rock formation inspired by the local limestone quarry near my house and the catacombs in Rome. I want to explore decentralised imagery, specifically deepfakes, and how images of the self are no longer something connected to us. Our own image has become representative of the self but disconnected from it.
I am also exploring further with the vertical nature of the scrolls and creating a piece using strips of canvas to make a disjointed image mounted on a metal frame. Each scroll will have metal inserted into the hems to give them form and make them sculptural. They will hold the form themselves instead of being displayed on curved blocks and each will be part of a bigger picture rather than individual scrolls.
I am applying to the Royal Drawing School Online Drawing Development Year. After completing the 10 week Drawing and Theory course at RDS, I want to continue developing my knowledge and understanding of drawing as it has had a huge impact in my knowledge, process and discipline.
I am continuing study with the national gallery to enhance my knowledge of art history, this will help two elements of my practice:
- My knowledge of painting
- My knowledge of the history of image making when exploring AI and deepfakes
I am also in the process of discussing returning to Art Direction with a boutique agency in Birmingham but this time as a part time Creative Director which will allow me to continue my art practice. The knowledge I’ve gained on the Masters has turned me from a purely conceptual Art Director able to ‘over-see’ production, to a Creative Director capable of understanding the intricacies of organisational and operational aspects of production, and I am ready to implement them into my professional life. Something I always felt uncomfortable with as an Art Director was not truly understanding the process of many creators, my knowledge ended with the process of Graphic Designers, photographers and videographers. I now have the tools to effectively communicate with other artists and makers having experienced the iterative and physical process myself at such a deep level, I think this is especially important when proposing to hire creatives within the industry as we continue to come up against AI generated imagery as an option for clients.
I’ve worked on updating my portfolio to now fit my newly found ‘Creative Director AND Artist’ identity. The URL has also gone from ‘rachaelburkinshawcreative’ to ‘rachaelburkinshaw’ – I am representing myself, not my creativity. My artistic practice and my art direction have become part of my everyday life and identity.
I’m aiming to build my exhibition experience, proposal writing skills and I am actively applying to competitions and collectives now that I have a cohesive and deeply understood body of work that is continuously expanding. I want to view my work in conversation with other people, works, themes and environments to then build towards applying for a PhD in the 2028 cycle. During this time I aim to continue my practice to develop different ways to explore and express my theme.
I have learnt across the duration of this course that I enjoyed and thrived in my work as a Senior Art Director as it allowed me to explore central themes through design, illustration and installation. This is just as important within my art practice and I now understand that research through making is the main reason that I make and create. Exploring this work further during a PhD feels like a natural progression. I have greatly enjoyed studying for the second time with UAL and aim to make it a trifecta.
In my research paper I wrote about the Van Genneps ritual process of Separation, Liminality and Incorporation. Turner refers to the liminal as the most important part of ritual practice. This course has been my liminal space in which to explore and grow, I now feel ready to fully incorporate what I have learnt into the wider world and my ongoing practice.
‘Liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos. A fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities… a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process…’ – Turner
Rae Eliza Digital 