narrative boards

500 word reflection:

The work I produced for SB2 was definitely a good way to end this academic year. I started this project with some ideas of what I wanted to do, mainly based around the things I find important to explore in my practice which are to do with race, gender identity and personal narratives. However, I knew that any race and gender conversations I wanted to have in my work would have been underlying – embedded in character design rather than in the content of the work that I was making.

So as that got confusing, I decided to roll over the theme I was exploring in SB1 onto SB2 and carry on exploring the idea of safe spaces. I had in the back of mind the fact that I would love to work with music in some way and that ended up working well for this project as I explored Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker. That album was perfect because it explored within its music a lot of the things that I think about and want to make work about. Most of these themes are inherently quite sad and a little bit existential; things like feeling that time is running out, feeling alienated, feeling a lack of connection to the self and the world but the intention I had for this project was to explore these feelings but also to nurture this idea of awareness. I like the pace and the feel of my work to be slow, and to take some decoding and some looking to understand besides it looking quite calm and perceived as just cute at face value. I found that I managed to translate those intentions in my final outcomes and end up with a body of work that’s not only a collection of work that’s exploring all these themes in the tone that I had but also a body of work that translates the kind of work I want to be making in the future.

One of the main things I feel I didn’t quite manage to explore as well as I’d wanted was the representational aspect of my project – I find it so important to make sure that my race and gender are translated into the work that I make because it is important to me to make work that people who look like me feel represented by; but I almost feel like the way I’ve drawn my character doesn’t make it that obvious that she is a woman of colour and I don’t know if this is a problem. I guess I just need to think about whether this is something I want to be more conscious of? Not because I feel like I have to but because I know how important it is to me and for my practice as a whole. Something to think about for future work and Level 6.

I think it has been good for me to use this album almost as a prompt for my ideas but I think that what I need to figure out is how my personal practice can move beyond this brief. I’ve really treated this brief as a personal project and it’s been good for me in terms of helping me situate the context I want my work to exist in and what I want it to be about but I think that I need to keep researching and learning and seeing where that will take me in Level 6.