Looking back at my Project Plan, I feel that its central concerns are still present, but the way I approach them has changed considerably. Migration, memory, identity, belonging and movement between places and cultures continue to appear within the work, although I am becoming less interested in documenting these experiences directly. Instead, I am increasingly looking for ways of transforming them through metaphor, mythology, poetry, photography, sound and language.
Earlier in the project, there was often a relatively direct relationship between an experience and the work that followed it. More recently, I have become interested in allowing greater distance between the two. Personal experience may provide the starting point, but I do not necessarily want the resulting work to explain where it came from or what it represents. I am beginning to understand that leaving something unresolved can create more space for another person to enter the work with their own associations.
The development of Storm has made this particularly clear to me. It began with a very simple mental image of an unnamed traveller holding onto a mast on an imperfect raft. I initially began developing the circumstances surrounding that image, but gradually the work became less about constructing a narrative and more about exploring uncertainty itself. I do not know whether the traveller reaches Ithaca, another harbour or nowhere at all. Hope remains within the work, but I no longer feel the need to guarantee a positive conclusion.
This has also made me think more carefully about my tendency to explain the meaning of my work. Some of the moments that now interest me most are those that resist explanation: two hands continuing to hold, a destination that cannot yet be seen, or a storm that might represent danger but might also become the force that carries the traveller somewhere unexpected. I am beginning to trust these images more and allow them to remain open.
Language has also started to become more physically integrated into the practice. My earlier investigations into writing with words have returned through Storm, but in a different way. Rather than placing text beside an image, I have begun experimenting with words becoming part of the image itself: language can form a mast, construct a raft, fall as rain or move through the sea. Introducing different languages has extended this further. Greek, English, Chinese, Japanese, German and Italian can occupy the same visual space without necessarily performing the same function or requiring complete translation.
This has opened questions that I would like to investigate further. What happens when part of a work cannot be understood linguistically? What survives when an idea moves from one language into another? Can translation, misunderstanding or loss become part of the work rather than something that needs to be corrected? These questions connect with a wider interest that has emerged through my research: how stories, images, melodies and structures survive while continually being transformed.
Research is therefore becoming less separate from the making. Literature and mythology remain important, particularly Homer, Cavafy, Shakespeare and Hemingway, but I am becoming more aware that collecting references is not enough. A reference becomes useful when it changes something within the work. King Lear, for example, has encouraged me to think about the storm not simply as an image of difficult circumstances, but as a space where external forces and internal experience can exist simultaneously. Hemingway has made me think about what remains after visible achievements have disappeared, while Cavafy continues to complicate the idea of destination and the importance of reaching Ithaca at all.
My recent research into transformation has also made me reconsider ideas of originality. Looking at the continuing reinvention of stories, films and music, including the different cultural and musical lives of Misirlou, has reinforced my interest in what survives when existing material is translated into another form. This also connects with my experimentation with AI. Initially AI offered a practical way of visualising something I did not have the digital skills to construct myself, but the interaction gradually became part of the enquiry. Describing an image, receiving an unexpected response, revising the instruction and deciding what to accept or reject introduced another form of translation between intention and outcome.
If I continue working with AI, I want to document this process more critically. Successful outcomes alone are not enough. Unsuccessful generations, misunderstandings, rejected versions and changes of direction may reveal more about the relationship between my intention and the technology than the final image itself.
Feedback has also made me reconsider how the work communicates once it leaves my own hands. I still find large-group feedback challenging and often gain more from sustained one-to-one or smaller conversations. However, I am beginning to recognise the value of another person seeing something that I did not intend. If I am asking the work to remain open, then I also have to accept that its meaning cannot remain completely under my control.
Perhaps the most important recognition at this stage is that I do not need more ideas. My practice already contains many recurring concerns and references. The challenge now is selection, development and restraint. The bird, the traveller, water, the Odyssey, movement and the search for another harbour have created a recognisable vocabulary within my work, but I also need to question when these images continue to generate something new and when I am returning to them because they have become familiar.
As I move forward, I therefore want to spend more time making, testing and comparing rather than continually expanding the conceptual framework. I want to document alternative versions, failed experiments and changes of direction, and ask more precisely why one image, word, language, sound or method remains while another is removed.
At this stage, I feel that my practice is becoming less concerned with documenting where a journey has taken place and more interested in what survives through transformation: what remains when a story changes form, when an experience becomes memory, when language moves between cultures, or when an image passes from imagination through another system before returning in an unexpected form.
I do not yet know where this direction will lead, and perhaps that uncertainty is becoming part of the practice itself.
For now, I am more interested in discovering what happens while the work is still moving than in deciding too early where it needs to arrive.
