Week 17: 7th – 13th January
It’s the first full week back at uni and term has started with a vengeance. I thought I had a relatively quiet week to start the year, but when I looked at my diary, I realised I had 2 meetings and a workshop booked. This, in addition to my studio practice and steadily increasing reading list.
Leeds International Artist Book Fair
The first meeting was about the Artist Book Fair, due to happen on 8th – 9th March. The project is organised by my supervisor Chris Taylor and his colleague John McDowall, and is a fantastic opportunity for book artists from all over the world to show and sell their wares. I’ve previously organised events alongside the fair as part of the wider exhibition programme, by inviting artists from my online group Artist Book Collective to submit to exhibitions and opportunities.
Given that many of my events have been organised and galvanised through the use of social media, Chris thought it would be an excellent opportunity to apply this to the fair as a whole, so I’m currently in the process of building a website and collating the archive of 15 years of book arts activity in Leeds.
Marks & Spencer archive
My second meeting was with the Marks & Spencer archive who I’d paid a visit to last year for a seminar on using archives in research-led teaching, and I’d discussed the possibility of developing interpretation workshops and exhibitions with them. I gave them a bit of background to my interests and experience and we agreed that it was something that we’d like to develop as an idea, perhaps drawing connections between artistic and commercial developments in Britain in the 20th century.
My preferred style of working is very reflexive, developing programmes in response to the participants ideas and requirements, and adding my own knowledge and experience when appropriate. This first came about through training with Creative Partnerships and continuing to work in gallery programmes like Tate Britain’s Visual Dialogues, so I used this as an example of the kind of thing I’d be interested in producing.
We agreed that I’d put something down in writing, but I decided to do a bit of a Google search to see if there was already info online about my previous projects. I was amazed and happy to learn not only that there was, but also that it was part of a gallery curriculum to provide teachers with lesson plans to engage their students with contemporary artworks.
Dr Who?
The week ended with a booster workshop designed to help with maintaining motivation through winter for PhD students, many of whom professed to attending as an excuse to emerge from their cellars and have a conversation with another person. It’s true, research can be a lonely process, especially when your head is stuck in a book for most of the day, so found it very useful and thoughtful that this kind of event had been organised by the University.
The description of the session included elements of examining work/life balance, motivation style, stress management and mapping support systems. All in all, it was useful to recap on why we were putting ourselves through the stress of a PhD, which isn’t so much of a problem for me at the moment, but might help to reflect on the further I get into the process.
One thing I particularly benefitted from was the section on motivation styles which asked a series of questions to determine whether you were driven by goals, relationships or the act of learning itself. As it turns out, my primary motivation is learning, with relationships a close second. Unsurprisingly, I scored zero for being motivated purely by goals. My interest however, came from being validated in how I get things done, as I’d always felt that ‘goal-orientated’ was somehow the right way to do things.
