The Personal Statement
Recently, all of my writing time has been taken up by press-releases and exhibition blurbs. On top of that I’ve been trying to write my personal statement – 500 words that go in the front of my research folder, that sum up me, my practice, and my work, all at once.
Part of being an artist is being able to explain why you do what you do. Some of us may feel affronted when asked to explain why our work exists, but artists have a responsibility to understand what it is that they are aiming to achieve – even those of us that are merely groping in an area should at least be able to describe the area in which we grope.
Not that I begrudge those artists that present a bohemian aloofness, when met with the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ questions. God knows, in three years of study I have seen my fair share of visiting artists that have taken that approach. While one is a student, however, one must justify one’s every turn, be that in tutorials, group critiques or a written personal statement that is assessed at the end of the year.
But how?
Having read the personal statement of every student that took part in last year’s Free Range show, I can see that quality varies greatly, and not just in use of language, but in the extent to which the artist clearly defines the parameters of his or her practice.
I started thinking about my key considerations when making work; themes that regularly appear, and concerns that I feel ought to be brought to attention. I use text a lot, so language comes into it, along with interpretation. But what is my work about? I think it’s about everything, but that is easy to say and difficult to prove, because it’s always about something. So it’s about specific things, like how language constructs meaning, and how interaction imparts narrative to all sorts of phenomena. If my work is about language, then it is also about cultures, and perhaps how language and culture are inextricably bound in a kind of feedback loop, where one is constantly informing the other, and vice versa. Authorship is a big issue too; at the beginning, where I take words or phrases that are already in the world and bend and re-present them to suit my needs; and after the work is presented, especially in my more recent work, like Cards, which is about the viewer continuing to have a direct experience of the work after they leave the gallery, and therefore continuing to construct the meaning of the piece long after I have made and shown it.
It’s not an easy task, talking and writing about your work, which is probably why so many of those early student crits are filled with awkward silences, and why so many of those visiting artists just refuse to make anything remotely resembling a personal statement. It is, however, essential to becoming an artist, and that’s the plan in the long term; to figure out the what’s and the why’s, until we reach a point where the work says it all for us, and we no longer have to worry about fitting our entire practice into 500 words for assessment.
