Three weeks to go. Plans are set (almost). Display decisions have been made (nearly). Lists are still growing. Anxiety levels are rising. Deadlines are being met. This is it.
My daily tasks are still shifting, with the smaller drawings being made but not on a daily basis.
Only the main drawing and writing tasks are set in stone. Everything else shifts depending on daily demands and the increasing pressure to make sure that my sketchbook and files need attention.
I have become a better sketchbook keeper although I still make drawings, sketches, lists, notes, diagrams on envelopes, scraps of paper, haphazardly, as the thoughts and ideas come to me.
This is fine as a method of capturing thoughts but not fine at all as I head into the final few weeks and find myself searching and compiling the work behind the work.
I have moved my triptych drawing out of my office and into another room in the house. This will inconvenience anyone wishing to play on the wii but will allow me to make a chequerboard of sketchbooks, notebooks and files on my office floor.
I feel as if I’m opening a filing cabinet that has been dropped from a great height and turned upside down.
This evidencing of the work is a whole other project and I find that, like creating a bibliography for a dissertation, providing the evidence of ideas, work and activity leading up to the production of a final piece of work almost more difficult than producing the work itself.
I want to make sure that my tutors and the external examiner can trace a path through the development of this year’s work, particularly since Christmas. It feels like a kind of reflective mapping – looking back at the last few months and connecting my interests and activity.
I also want to use this mapping as a process for me, to consolidate the three years of the degree so that I can form some kind of plan for going forward. One of the reasons I became a mature student was to provide a stepping stone to a different type of career. I realise that I haven’t chosen a particularly easy path but it’s one full of possibilities.
