This week has been spent on working on a number of different things, including a collaborative project.
At ECA we have a few small rooms which are called “project spaces”. These are rooms which are to be used for a number of different things – working in, exhibiting, projections, installations etc etc. We can book this facility out and it is a great resource. We also have a timetable of collaborative working groups. These happen across year-groups and there is one per week. The idea is to come together with your group and plan how to use the space/work together and then present the work in a tutor led crit on the same day, with other students.
A lot of students, for a number of reasons, choose to install their work alongside each other and present as a mini-exhibition. However, I feel this is a waste and any opportunity to work with others in a different way is exciting and not to be overlooked. The chance to do similar projects out of the university environment are much less frequent. So, it was lucky that the group I was put in had similar ideas.
We had attended a crit of another group earlier in the year and had initially discussed the idea of an installative project, possibly with a response type way of working.
We then met up last week to further discuss the ideas we had. It was quite a natural chat in which ideas quickly came to be solutions about the type of work we wanted to produce. The other two students tend to work with both made structures and used/found materials. Although this at first is not exactly tied to my own practice, I felt that the ideas concerned with forms and surface and reduced colour did have relation and I was keen to work on something in a different way.
Working together seemed quite intuitive and natural – it was easy to come to collective decisions and arrive at solutions through mutual discussion. Finally, the tutor-led crit with other students was successful and raised other questions and points, which was great.
It was a great day out of the studio and has given me more insight to the kind of colaborative projects I´d like to work on in the future.
