I have returned to my Critical Review and looked again at the work I have completed so far, together with the feedback I have received. At this stage, I feel that the main ideas are there, but I need to develop the relationship between my research and my own practice more clearly.
One of the areas I need to focus on is making sure that the artists, writers and ideas I discuss are not simply included as references, but are connected directly to the questions I am exploring in my own work. I want the Critical Review to show how research has influenced the way I think about memory, identity, migration, mythology and personal experience, and how these ideas have affected the work I am making.
I also need to be more critical in the way I discuss sources. Rather than only describing an artist or a theory, I need to consider why it is relevant to my practice, what I agree or disagree with, and whether it has changed the way I approach my work.
As I develop the second draft, I will return to the Critical Strategies material and the academic support resources to help me strengthen the structure of the review and make my argument clearer. I will also check the assessment outcomes again so that I can make sure the Critical Review demonstrates the level of research, critical thinking and reflection expected at this stage.
I also need to make sure that all the sources I use are referenced consistently using Harvard referencing, with a complete bibliography at the end. This will help me distinguish clearly between my own reflections and the ideas or information I have taken from other sources.
My aim for the second draft is therefore not simply to add more research, but to make the relationship between research, critical thinking and my own creative practice much clearer.
End of Chapter 7.0 – Reflection
Reaching the end of this chapter, I feel that the direction of the work has become clearer, but not necessarily simpler. If anything, one of the main things I have recognised is that I do not need more ideas at this stage. I already have enough material, references and possibilities. The challenge now is to decide what deserves to remain, what needs to be tested further and what should be removed.
At the beginning of this stage, I was still trying to bring many different concerns into the same space: mythology, migration, identity, language, memory, photography, poetry, moving image and personal experience. These subjects remain important to me, but I can now see the danger of allowing every work to carry all of them at once. When too many ideas are present, the work can become over-explained and the central image can lose some of its strength.
Storm has helped me recognise this more clearly.
The work began from a very simple mental image, but from that image a much larger field of thought developed. What has interested me most is not the possibility of explaining every symbolic element, but allowing the work to remain open enough for another person to enter it. The unnamed traveller has therefore become important. Although the work inevitably contains traces of my own experiences and thinking, I do not want the traveller to become simply another representation of myself. I want the situation to remain uncertain enough for the reader or viewer to bring something of their own to it.
This has also made me question my tendency to explain too much. I often feel the need to describe what an image means, where it came from and how it should be understood. I am beginning to realise that this can sometimes reduce the openness of the work rather than strengthen it. Some of the strongest moments in Storm are perhaps the ones that remain unexplained: the hands holding the mast, the possibility of another harbour, or the uncertainty of whether the traveller survives at all.
I need to trust those moments more.
The multilingual experiment has also opened a direction that feels important. Earlier work had already explored the relationship between language and image, but here language has started to behave physically. Words are no longer simply placed beside an image. They can become structure, movement and environment. Different languages can occupy different parts of the same space and do not necessarily need to be understood equally.
This raises further questions that I have not yet answered. Why should one language become the sea and another the rain? What happens when a reader cannot understand part of the image? Can misunderstanding, translation or disappearance become part of the work itself? These questions seem more useful to me now than simply adding further languages or producing more variations of the same composition.
My use of AI has created another area of uncertainty. Initially it provided a practical way to make visible an image that I did not have the technical digital skills to construct myself. However, the process became more interesting than this practical solution. Describing an idea, seeing how it was interpreted, rejecting parts of the result, changing instructions and responding to unexpected outcomes created a form of dialogue between intention and result.
If I continue working with AI, I need to document this process more critically. The successful image alone is not enough. The failures, misunderstandings, rejected versions and changes of direction may reveal more about the process than the final result. This would also allow me to think more carefully about authorship, control and what happens when an idea passes through a technological system before returning as an image.
The research around transformation and inherited ideas has also become important. Looking at works such as the Odyssey, Cavafy, King Lear, The Old Man and the Sea, Seven Against Thebes, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven and the continuing transformations of Misirlou has reinforced my belief that artistic ideas do not emerge in complete isolation. Stories, melodies, structures and images move through time and are repeatedly reconstructed.
However, I also recognise the danger here. Research can easily become another form of collecting. I do not need to continue adding names simply to demonstrate that I have researched widely. The more important question is whether a source changes what I make.
Misirlou is useful to me only if its continual transformation encourages me to transform something within my own practice. Homer is useful only if the idea of the journey changes how I understand movement or destination. Hemingway matters only if the question of what remains after loss changes the way I construct the traveller. Research needs to enter the work rather than remain beside it.
This is perhaps the most important recognition at the end of this chapter.
My problem is no longer finding material.
My problem is selection.
I also recognise that some images and ideas have appeared repeatedly throughout my practice: the bird, the sea, the traveller, the journey, the harbour, migration, survival and the Odyssey. They have helped me develop a recognisable visual and poetic language, but repetition can eventually become predictable. I need to question whether these motifs are still opening new possibilities or whether I am sometimes returning to them because they feel familiar.
It may therefore be useful to challenge myself by temporarily removing some of them and seeing whether the work can still carry the same concerns without relying on the same symbols.
Moving forward, I want to concentrate less on expanding the universe of the project and more on testing what is already there. I want to make, compare, reject and remake. I want the reflection around the work to become more precise: what changed, what failed, what surprised me and what that discovery makes me do next.
Perhaps the most useful lesson from this chapter is that the writing should not always explain the artwork.
Ideally, the artwork should sometimes know something that the writing does not yet know.
Storm remains unresolved, and I now see that as one of its strengths. At this point I do not need to know where the raft finally arrives.
I need to discover what happens to the work while it is still at sea.
