entioned in the introductory presentation of the unit. This will help you start to map, evidence and manage the journey over the next 24 weeks. It will be important for you to remember to allow time to make work in an open and enquiring way, as well as place your ideas within a contemporary context. You will need to think critically and reflectively and continue to articulate and evidence your ongoing research methodologies.
To reference Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking (an image of thought that contains the ceaseless non-hierarchical connectivity between things) spend time checking in with the worksheet and the introductory presentation across the next 26 weeks to help you identify the relations between theory, practice, context and dissemination. Your Personal Practice Plan should be a live document of this journey and help you identify/clarify key pivotal moments within your creative, critical, reflexive and contemporary practice.
The final submission will be a refined and focussed document/presentation highlighting the pivotal and connecting moments of study. The Contextual Study for this unit will concentrate on audience engagement and public presentation.
Use this worksheet to capture your initial thinking.” – text copied from Testing Your Boundaries Worksheet.
How do I create a framework?
I feel I am still figuring this out. At the moment I am still reading, researching and making fairly disparately. However, I have created another research document – that will likely not see the light of day since it is already 30k words and likely not of interest to anybody other than myself – but I have felt that I needed to do my due diligence around creating my framework of research, and the starting point in that was finding my menu of elemental materials.
What are my anchor points?
- We are all connected and entangled
- We are made of the same stuff
- We come from stardust (and so does everything else on earth and in the cosmos)
What are the social, political, ecological, technical (or other) concerns in my practice? (is my work concerned with social, political, ecological, economical, technological conditions?)
Social: Environmentalism and Harmony (opposite of divisiveness), interconnectedness, bringing people together.
Political: Trying to counteract Divisiveness – we are all made from the same stuff. We should consider ourselves to be one planetary species out to care for our entire planet. Countries, borders and labels distract us from the point, which is to preserve all life and non-life on earth, and not not disrupt the natural order of Gaia or the Cosmos.
Ecological: We are all interconnected in ways that reach further than our understanding. Everything impacts everything – a ripple effect that reaches to the ends of our universe and beyond.
What do I keep returning to?
Stardust. I am fascinated by the fact that certain elements on the periodic table are only on earth because they have come through multiple dying stars that have gone supernova, exploded into the cosmos and spread as dust (stardust), and over millenia they’ve come together again to form other celestial bodies (mostly stars), only to explode over again, each supernova explosion forging different variations of elements.
I have always been fascinated by gold, not as jewellery but as an element and an art material. I am considering creating a body of work/paintings made purely from gold.
Where are the creative risks in my practice?
Making sculptures of assemblage creatures that have come alive from my paintings.
Testing methods for artists to experience connectedness (this might not work).
What is the focus of my practice?
Communicating proof of Interconnectedness and Entanglement as a means of bringing people together.
What are my research methods?
At the moment, my research is taking me towards Science (Chemistry, Physics and Cosmology), but also Philosophy and Natural History. I am currently building my menu of ‘elemental materials’ that I will use to test. This has been reading-based research up until now, but once I have refined my materials list, the research focus will then move to the internal experience of making the artefacts.
Somehow this research has also led me much deeper down my meditation path, and I’m finding some astounding things happening to me during meditation. Given how connected my work is with understanding the birth of the chemical elements on the periodic table, I find myself meditating about deep time and deep space in order to take myself out of a day-to-day headspace and think more about the passage of time through the universe’s lifespan.
At this stage I’d call it inspired thought – I am merely capturing each experience as it unfolds.
Where might my research go next?
More tests about whether working with elemental materials help the artist to experience interconnectedness. (i.e. potentially providing artists with an alternative means to experience connectedness other than through social connection) – looking at the internal experience of working with elemental materials.
On the other hand, the cyborg-type creatures that keep showing up in my paintings, demanding to be included in the narrative, are quite literally crawling off the page and into sculpture works. Their story and function my need to be told. This might take me into a fictional writing element, which, funnily enough, was the idea when I signed up for the course as a multi-disciplinary artist that would be drawing, painting, sculpting and writing.
I am still trying to allow the research and the experiments to develop organically.
What might be included in my contextual research?
My findings of working directly with elemental materials.
What might my audience look like?
I feel that my audiences might not necessarily be art enthusiasts, but rather space enthusiasts, mineralogists, philosophers, geologists.
Debbie New 