I thoroughly enjoyed Dr Michele Whiting’s Video lecture entitled ‘Meaning Making / Making Meaning’. I felt that it was an incredibly selfless act for her to share the inner workings of her practice. Generally, I have found many artists to be quite secretive about their practice, and so to have an inside view of Michele’s thoughts, practice, process and snippets of reading and research was hugely valuable for me.
In her sharing, she made clearer, what has up until now been something quite abstract to me. This is because I have never made art in this way – the depth of thought, the introspection required, the documentation of the whole process – as is the expectation on an MA course. It therefore made me feel a little clearer on the depth to which one should be ‘going within’ when practising art at an MA level.
Somehow, learning about Michele’s process gave me permission to go deeper within and really think about what I want to make and why it’s important to me. Initially I was going about the making with an outside-in view, scratching my head in confusion about why the ideas and inspiration would not come. But going about things from an inside-out direction, thinking about and feeling for what is important, and then thinking about ways that this could be portrayed feels like a new skill, and now that I’m learning it (Work in progress), the taps have opened and I’m bursting with ideas.
Debbie New 