Birmingham City University

The more I read the more I want to expand expand expand! In a few weeks I will be giving an assesable presentation about ‘my practice’. It seems the pressure to define my practice is sending my brain into overdrive, trying to absorb and adapt everything I read and see into the confused mush it has become. The problem is, I feel as though my art-making, my personality, and my feelings are all intertwined – an intregral part of my identity. But who I am is undefinable, just like my practice, I am a mixture of experiences, of stimuli, and of relationships, all these things make up my essential ‘me’ness. How can I begin to explain where my practice has developed from, how can I narrow it down to one interest, one experience, one meaning.

And now in the panic of this realisation, I am trying to steal other people’s meanings and histories, in a futile attempt to get some clarity, At least this process of outward seeking has enabled me to draw some comparisons, and at least figure out what my practice is not!

I must simplify! I must reduce! I must stop this post now because I have a meeting!

It’s the 1st of March. My degree show is 105 days away, and so what better time to start a new blog!

Last week was a mid-way point, a critical review of what we have developed so far this year, and where it is going from here – with the perspective that we are now planning what our final presentation of work will be. I presented a video sequence I have been working on, a collage of footage from Celebrity Big Brother along with subtitles, and clashing audio from Ch4’s ‘Bodyshock, The girl with Eight Limbs’. It’s great to feel like all my disjointed ideas and feelings from the 1st and 2nd year are finally starting to come together into a resolved piece. In hindsight, all that I was exploring before – ritual, the museum of otherness, the alien Self, all of these things were working towards this more fluid and cohesive notion of the Other as Opposite. Its exciting to read articles and books that affirm my own feelings about this interesting subject! However I can’t help feeling that, with so short a time until the degree show, this is only just the beginning (I know there is life after the degree show, but I am of course striving to present a body of work that is coherent and well researched).

An encouraging result of the mid-way review was that I can finally feel settled with regards to my choices of mediums and their structure. My biggest downfall has always been the formal aspect of my practice, I second guess every decision I make, and 99% of the time seem to get it wrong. Well what a relief that this time its that 1% that I have been struggling after. Now I can just focus on the content, on trying to access the meaning that I know is there!

Over the weekend I read a compelling,if a little disturbing, chapter in a pschoanalysis book which discussed Freuds ideas with regards to the Other. His theory was that the Other is both familliar and strange because our narcissism projects all our repressed self-hatred onto the face of another, therefore leading to a demonised double, who is both our opposite and our mirror. I know that Freudian theory is largely dicreditted, but doesnt this ring true? It seems especially relevent to my developing practice, with regards to the voyeuristic nature of television documentaries. We are drawn to these strange and foriegn faces on the screen, not just because they are curious, but because they are uncanny, they are a mirror of ourselves – only we dont see a mirror we see something totally separate and alien to us, that we can hold ourselves in higher esteem for not being like them.

Perhaps that is a generalisation of the television viewer, but I know it certainly applies to me. Even as an artist, and with this work, I seperate myself, I am self righteous and self aware, and that is why I must make work in which the viewer becomes self conscious, I see their ignorance of their own condition, I seek to reveal it. Part of that process however, is revealing it to myself. It always comes back to me.

I’m off to watch ‘Gypsy Weddings’.