Reflective Workshop (collaboration project)…

500 Word Reflection Summary on the Collaboration Project

Following Rachel Gannon's lecture reflecting on her own work, it gave me a number of things to look back upon over the two week starting project. To reflect back over what was successful, what was not and what I have learnt from the exercise.

Reflecting back over the two week collaboration project, it was a great exercise to get me back into the ways of working and thinking about my ides to come into the 3^rd year. Sometimes I have found that having such a long break can really push you out of sync and practice causing me to be un-productive at the start of the project. The collaborative project has warmed me up to BA7 allowing me to start thinking, producing and reflecting on my own practice again. Being randomly partnered with Rachel Peel was good as I have never really talked or worked with her before. Initially, it was difficult working with her as we are very different people through the way we work and our personalities also. I am quite un-confident about my own work and ideas so don’t always like to communicate about them, as I feel embarrassed and ashamed of my work. So communicating with her for me was very difficult at the beginning. But as we started to brainstorm ideas together I could start to open up and discuss ideas with her, rather than taking a back seat and going with other peoples’ idea which I tend to do in previous projects.  

Working with a partner is great to explore new ways of working and thinking. Experimenting with new processes and ideas and input that you may not come up with on your own. You also have to put a lot of trust into the other person and hope that they also give their input into the project. This can be a negative about working with other people as if they don’t engage in the work as much as you do and don’t hold their own weight it can make the project very difficult. This didn’t happen though unlike others in my year whose partners didn’t show up. I decided to work with the medium of collage and I have never properly worked with this before. Therefore collaborating pushed me outside of my comfort zone and being prepared to be playful and take risks. You can tend to play it safe and avoid exploring new ways of working, sticking to the ones you know work well in your own work but as I was also working with someone else I took that step forward.  

Reflecting over the two weeks there were a few ups and downs in the project… We brainstormed ideas first then went away and created work to discuss in the curated dialogue. During the second week though we hit a rut and didn’t know how to push our ideas and extend our discoveries into final outcomes. We tackled a rather large topic and then when we decided on what we particularly wanted to focus on, we explored the ideas fully quite quickly and was stuck in a position to wrap up the project or explore another route. But because of the timescale, practically it was not realistic to extend down another path of ideas, which left our final outcomes maybe not as successful as they could have been. Looking at other groups and how they produced animations, films, screen-prints… it felt like we could have pushed our ideas so much further. But even so, I still learnt new way of working! 

The lessons I learnt through this exercise was that working with someone else you must be open-mind and don’t be scared to talk about your own ideas and be pushed out your comfort zone. That you can produce a lot of diverse work when working with another person and it is a good exercise to free yourself up and work a fresh. To conclude, I think that working with another person that you also haven’t socialised with can really help you push your own work as its not just you, but another that you need to work for. I am pleased that I decided to look into a new medium because even though the project outcome could have been a lot more playful like others in year 3, it did give me new knowledge and new way of working that I may come back to in BA7. If I had not had the collaboration project this wouldn’t have happened. I think my partner did not find the project as successful as I did for the reason her work used watercolour which she works in regularly, but because I worked differently from what I normal do I think that it was a really important task that has got me started for my own practice in BA7. Leaving me raring to go and get working productively on my own brief!!

Reflective Drawing Workshop

Workshop

My reflective drawings… looking at the highs and lows of the project and also my personal space of working and pushing those boundaries.