This week I went in and delivered a session to a group of year 10 GCSE artists. It was rather nerve wracking but also fascinating. They were a very forgiving group who listened attentively and seemed to enjoy what I had to say. I got them making monoprints and tried to encourage them to experiment, play and just see what happened.
It was very interesting meeting their teacher, she gave me a little of their background and showed me what they had done the previous week (really quick cardboard collagraph type prints, but mainly using the relief).
There were so many things I forgot to say, but it was also such a tricky task to try and whittle down the story of my development and show all the plates, prints and sketchbooks in 30 minutes!
Aside from the feel good factor and really enjoying getting them to explore and loosen up in the making part I think it really made me reflect on my own work. I looked back over all my sketchbooks to see what I had used for what and how things had developed.
My main takeaway was that I realise that I have now developed 'a practice'. I've never really understood the term until now. I knew that it meant 'the arty work you do and everything around it' but it always seemed like a rather foreign term to me, one that just seemed a bit strange and that I couldn't really apply holistically as I seemed to do bits here and bobs there and couldn't really see the bigger picture and how it all slotted together. It makes much more sense now!
Jonathan has said a few times that one of the purposes of the MA is to set yourself up in your own practice so that you can carry on without the MA and I feel very optimistic that I'm well on the way to doing just that. The huge break over the summer is a perfect way to test this out, obviously there's the research paper to think about, and the school holidays which are always disruptive, but it's also a chance to shake things up a bit and see how I respond to the change without the weekly routine of the group sessions.
I feel like this was such a positive and interesting exercise for me (I hope they got something out of it too!) I'm going back in a couple of weeks to repeat it to the other half (who are apparently a little less forgiving) so it will be really interesting to see how they respond. I'm going to tweak the presentation and take a couple of bits out as I tried to cram in far too much! I'm already looking forward to it!
The school posted a little write up about the visit which I found very interesting to read as it's always fascinating to see what someone else heard when you're speaking.