My formative feedback helped me recognise that the different strands of my practice are beginning to connect more clearly, but also that I now need to push them further rather than simply describe what I am doing.
One important area for development is the relationship between research and practice. My tutor responded positively to my exploration of storytelling, mythology, memory, travel, language and open interpretation, but encouraged me to make stronger connections between these ideas and the artists and writers I am researching. In Project 9 I want to move beyond mentioning influences and use them more critically. This includes further reading around interpretation and visual meaning, particularly Terry Barrett’s Criticizing Photographs and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, alongside my existing research into Umberto Eco, Cy Twombly, George Herbert and Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani. I also need to support my research visually through relevant images and carefully selected quotations.
The feedback also made me think more deeply about the distinction between travel, journey and movement. Travel describes physical movement between places, but journey can also involve memory, identity and psychological change. This connects strongly with my own experience and with the recurring imagery of water, birds, horizons, migration and uncertain destinations within my work. I want to investigate these connections without explaining them so completely that the viewer is left with only one interpretation.
This is particularly important for Storm. Until now I have been thinking about language as something that can construct the image rather than simply accompany it. My discussion with my tutor suggested another possibility: introducing movement and animation so that the words themselves can behave like the storm. Text might appear, disappear, move horizontally like wind, fall like rain or rise like water. This could develop Storm from a static visual poem into moving-image work and bring together poetry, visual language, sound and film.
Another important lesson from the feedback concerns the audience. Earlier in my practice I often explained symbols because I wanted the viewer to understand what I intended. I am increasingly interested in allowing meaning to remain fluid. Project 9 gives me an opportunity to test how much information the work actually needs and what happens when I leave space for the viewer to construct their own connections.
For the final presentation I am considering developing a website that brings the different works together while allowing each piece to exist separately. Rather than presenting everything as one continuous explanation of my development, the website could become a space through which the viewer moves between individual works, films, photographs, poems, experiments and research. Material from my existing blog can provide the foundation, but the final presentation needs to be more selective and considered rather than simply reproducing the blog.
Therefore, Project 9 will be about development rather than adding more material for its own sake. I want to experiment further with Storm as moving image, deepen the research supporting my ideas about interpretation, language and movement, and consider carefully how the individual works communicate when they are allowed more independence. Most importantly, I want to continue investigating the question that has emerged through this unit: what survives when something is translated or transformed?
