Assessment preparation

With rather less than 24 hours to go till the "curated" work and reflective journals lie ready on the table for the Unit 1 Assessment, I am feeling almost ready - almost but not quite! So much more could be done... but it is always thus. There comes a point when you have to tell yourself to STOP. (For me, it's usually about 10 minutes before the deadline.) However with some hours yet in hand, I'm using this blog post to think-out-loud about what's done and what still needs doing.

The reflective-journals bit wasn't difficult - it's taking ages, though. First I made subject files from the blog posts over the past 16 months. Some files ran to over 200 pages, so they ended up as several "books" (held together by clips rather than proper binding (it's quicker...). Printed two pages to the sheet, they become a manageable size -

The larger categories are Artists & Exhibitions (6 books so far) and Book du Jour (2 books) - Reading&Research is also ongoing and only just fits into one clip. Some of the finished projects are japanese-bound: Structure project, Text project, Place-encounter-time project, Skybirds, Black Books, Screenprinting, the Route book. Other ongoing projects are Un-writing; What the camera sees; Materials project. This year I've not been diligent about recording "this week at college" - there are notes in the notebooks but very little on the blog, in comparison to my extensive reports of lectures and seminars in the first year of the course.

Still to find and print - Travel Bags project (which includes some of the screenprinting, and the pre-xmas pop-up shop). Estimated time: 1 hour.

Also needing printing - January's additions to the ongoing blog books. Estimated time: 1 hour.

Another part of the reflective journals are the notebooks, in which I write "everything" in chronological order, making a non-alphabetical index as I go along. (If there is time I will cut up the photocopied indexes to have all the categories from the books together (eg, lectures; reading; exhibitons... Retyping it all to amalgate the indexes would be a waste of time and energy.)

In the bottom two books you can just about see the little red dots folded over the edges of the pages -- these mark useful passages, things that have relevance or interest for me at this point. IF there is time, I'd like to go through yet again and write some of these into ... a book ... or onto a scroll ... They'd made an inspirational collection, something that might help me keep focus. But first, the other books need tidying up (loose papers gluing in, etc) and marking with dots. Estimated time: 3 hours.

So much for reflective journals - and I really have tried to be reflective (and critical), to make myself think and analyse when looking at exhibitions or having an idea for a new project. A big part of doing a course like this is to get beyond "I like/don't like that" (after all, who cares?) and to have more useful things to say than "that's nice" and "that's lovely" - !

Now to the actual works to be shown. Looking through my boxes of "little books" has made me realise how truly little they are --- fun though it was to make them, and however valuable the experience was, I don't want them hanging around and being a drag on future projects. So -

The phoenix phenomenon -

The projects like the "panacea bags" and the screenprinted fabric and papers didn't get thrown into the flames; they may have a different sort of reincarnation.

One outcome I'm very happy with is the resolution of the "journey lines" in two ways. First, the "travel bags", which explain what the lines and words are all about, if the viewer does a bit of reading and thinking. And the latest Sketchbook Project contribution, Along The Lines - the 11 underground lines, written in their entirety, in both directions - in alphabetical order (Bakerloo, Central, Circle...Victoria, Waterloo&City). There wasn't time for DLR and Overground - that would have added another 95 stations to the 270 underground stations, and goodness knows how much track length to the 402 km (x 2) already covered. The book is filled - just the title and colophon to add, and into the post it goes. A replica, reformatted as a concertina book, will be one of the works at the assessment.

Than again, it might be the only work, apart from the ashes ... and the reflection ...