This week’s pre-recorded presentations by a number of artists, some from the 1.3 cohort, others that graduated some time ago, and one by one of OCA’s course leaders I felt was one of the most useful video lectures that I’ve watched on this course to date.
A number of times on the course, I have asked instructors to ‘show us what a good one looks like’. They’ve been reluctant to do this – and I can see why: I’m sure they would worry about the risk that seeing others’ process in detail too early in the course might influence the course of our own work when ours is only in its infancy. It appears that this happens regardless.
As much as my work and process is nothing like anything that any of the other artists presented, I felt it useful to see what the end point of this course or the end point of a PHD could look like. I am very literal in my approach to learning and showing, a real “don’t tell me how, SHOW ME HOW” kind of person.
And so seeing the end goal, I feel that this lecture should have been shown to us in the first few weeks in the course, and framed as “we know it seems impossible to imagine, but this is where we’re going to help you to go to over the next few years. These are the skills we’ll help you develop, etc.” That is, to show the destination and then circle back to develop the skills, but at least the students would have an idea of the end goal and expectation.
Sometimes people that work in academia (same in corporate actually – this happens to many of my clients), are too close to their own work, so that they battle to see it through the eyes of a person who’s never been exposed to this type of learning before – masters degrees and bachelors degrees are totally different ways of learning. And so, for a person that has come from a business background (myself) and never had to do practice-based research, the end goal and expectation has up until now been completely obscure. It has been a major source of stress and left me fraught with feelings of inadequacy that I am just not getting it, just not understanding what I’m supposed to be doing.
I therefore took about 8 hours to watch the 5 hours worth of video, stopping the video often to take notes, make observations, look back at my own work, etc. So as much as I feel this is information I would have preferred to have been exposed to a year ago, better late than never.
My main takeaways from this session that pertain specifically to me:
- Only now do I understand Michele’s question from way back when “where are you in the work?” I had not realised that it was not only okay to, but actually expected that we as artists can really go deep when it comes to sharing outwardly what our inward processes and experiences are.
- Most of the MA students are investigating very personal, very inwardly-focused themes and emotions, and that that’s okay. (with a business background, and having begun but not finished Masters Degree programmes in business, it is the opposite – opinions, beliefs and feelings are set aside in the name of hard research and fact).
- Since I started looking into the theme of interconnectedness, I have been even more drawn to meditation, and my meditative practice has become and almost daily practice. It has been inextricably linked to my MA research and work and thinking, but I have never really paused to think on just how entangled they are.
- I had been journalling the results of some meditation sessions – the particularly insightful ones – in my own personal journal, but have not up until now shared these as I had worried that these ruminations were too ‘woo-woo’ for sharing as academic research. I now know that they are not. I can now step back and see that these meditation sessions and the insights gleamed from some of them are a very real part of my research process.
- This has all made me revisit and have a long think about my why. Why is environmentalism so close to my heart? Why do social constructs get me so riled up? Why am I so drawn to energy? Why am I obsessed with stardust? Why have I always been so fascinated with the element of gold even before knowing it comes from stars?
Debbie New 