I wanted to look at what I've made over the course of the course. This is a selection which includes everything 'finished' (with the exception of the mixed lithograph and engraving but it gives a good idea of what the final print will be like) pretty much in the order that they were made. I have drawers and sketchbooks full of things which haven't worked or which were only ever tests to see what a technique could do (see the film for a flick through of some of that).
Looking over it I'm struck by the variety and yet the cohesion. I felt the same when I saw everything at Wisley. There's a lot of variety but it all sits together quite nicely somehow I think. Again, I find myself thinking that this is similar to the forest - it's immensely varied yet it's one big eco-system where everything just about coexists. Not everything gets on perfectly, but when put in the right immediate company it all works.
I feel like I understand my work so much better now than I did previously, even 6 months ago. I looked back at a post I wrote right at the start of the year in resonse to the unit 2 feedback when I tried to set myself a target of making a print a day and still didn't fully understand the value of the monoprints I was making. I'm looking forward to this understanding continuing to grow. I also think that having feedback and being challenged has been fantastic and made me question an awful lot, but sometimes I need to step back from it and just admit to myself that some things are not achievable. I knew when I wrote the statement that I was going to try to make a print a day that it wasn't really realistic. I don't have 9-5pm to concentate on work. My day ends at 3pm with the school run and I still have to buy food, wash clothes and walk the dog during the school day so I just don't have the time to make a print everyday. I do have time to make something and this is where the collages, bundles and other things come in. Previously I set aside a small sketchbook and tried to make something every day. Even if it was just a thumbnail sketch or a little set of mini square collages. It was a fun project and it has fed into things I have made since. I'd really like to do that again so am thinking that from Januray 2025 I'll restart that project. It might be someithng as simple as a snippet of something that I'm printing that day, it might be a collage or a few lines of stitch, but it'll be made.
Looking at the work above I'm also struck by how I can look at each piece and see the technical experiment and then I can link then and see the next piece that grew out of the experiment from an earlier piece.
I started experimenting wiht etching early on in the course and was interested in using things foraged from the forest in soft ground which led to using caustic soda painted onto and around ferns to etch lino. The overlaying of monoprints using natural materials keeps cropping up, crossing over techniques. Then the colour hunts began, how orange is the orange in the forest? - very orange it turns out!
Through conducting research into place and speaking to Neil Bousfield about his research and work on place I have gained a far better understanding of what it is I'm trying to communicate. In my study statement I said that I wantde to look at the forest from lots of different persepctives, but I know now that I can't really do this. My experience of 'place' is unique to me, so even if I try to interpret another perons experience and try to look from their point of view it will always be influenced by my own experience therefore I can only really make genuine work from my experience. I think this is where the research comes in. Making sure that I am as well informed as possible about what is happeneing and why and what went before in the forest will enhance my understanding of it and therefore allow me to have a richer experince that I can draw on to make the work. I know that my work can make suggestions, offer ideas and hint at opinions but also that it will be viewed subjectively by each person that sees it.
The most important thing to me is that I understand and reflect on each piece, use it to ask further questions, reflect on it to better understand it and most importantly go back again and again and see what I understand of the piece, the forest and myself in the future. I realised at Wisley that I've been living with some of my work for a couple of years and that each print still has the power to prompt a new question, to remind me of something unanswered in it that I want to revisit and often holds a treasured memory of a particluar day in the forest with my family, or my dog or a special place. There's a lot more tied up in the images than anyone else will ever really know and that's important to me because at the end of the day I have to be able to look at my work and feel proud of it, to feel that it says something and to see the feel of it. If I can't do that then it's not done yet.