reflective statement

The above image is an excerpt from some work I made during this term. A long, horizontal stack; this section appears somewhere between the halfway mark and the end of the piece. It documents me moving down a long strip of paper, using writing as the vehicle to get from one side to the other and timing the event. The idea was that the strip of paper would become a representation of a length of lived time; manifested as a physical length. It would also act as a record, a tiny archive of how that 26mins and 48seconds of my life had been filled. Looking back, it seems an unnervingly apt metaphor (in both form and content) for the experience of taking part in a degree; in particular my current predicament of unwilfully watching its end grow insistently closer. Where are the breaks on this thing? Whose foot’s on the accelerator? Do they really need to be pressing it so fucking hard? This awareness of a fast approaching end produced a severe reluctance (aversion/phobia/evasion; none of these would be understatements) in response to undertaking the task of a ‘reflective statement’. A somewhat melodramatic but understandable foot-dragging. A resistance to comply with an enforced reflection, which signalled the end of an event I didn’t want to end. As I write in the piece, ‘once something has ended, you’re ‘just left with a record, something archival. And it’s this record which holds the capacity for measurement. Something can’t be measured unless it’s already happened’. I didn’t want to think about myself as being on the other side of my degree; outside, looking back in. With hindsight, it strikes me as painfully unsurprising how even my language in reference to the end of my degree has changed as I grow closer to its conclusion. Whereas once, it represented the beginning of something else (life as an independent artist and adult) it has since developed a concrete air of finality; a consciousness of being about to slip past a bookend, that this pocket of three years will be a mile stone used to measure my life- events becoming things that happened before or after my studies.
I wrote in the work; ‘As I move further forward, further and further down the paper I can see its edges sliding in my periphery. Slowly moving from looking ahead at all the paper to be filled to filling it. Pushing more and more of it into the past. When I reach the end, I’ll be in what was my future. That sounds like bullshit, but I think that there’s something in it.’ Turns out there really was something in it. It’s a little squirm inducing reading that now, as any metaphor was blindly unintentional. I was only trying to relay the physical, ordinary mechanics of writing and moving down the paper, ignorant to any sense microcosm or the prophetic. The end of the paper/this degree has all too quickly moved from a distant point in my periphery, to an immanent and dislocated end. And here I find myself, about to ‘slip off into the unrecorded’ and reflecting.
It’s probably quite obvious to a reader, that while writing this I’m having a hard time separating critical reflection, from the self-indulgent sort (laced with what’s quite likely, an unhelpful quantity of nostalgia for such recent past). However, seeing’s as my practice has become centred around matters of time, attempts at understanding/translating/recording it’s passing, I thought this is a temporal indulgence I’d allow. Looking back at my work and my relationship to it, I find its most successful when I have found ways to honestly synthesise my practice with my view of myself. So perhaps it’s apt that I should pull this sentiment into the admin too, where I can. This preoccupation with a sense of honesty, sincerity and integrity has become a compelling force in the progression my practice and the course it’s taken. Forcing both an honesty with myself and with the viewer, becoming comfortable with aspects of myself which directly influence the work, but that the work is not expressly about. For example; although my work has always had temporal references, would I have become so obsessive or focussed on time it if it were not for experiencing symptoms of disassociation or grief: probably not. Is it important that people know this to understand or engage with the work: not at all. Is it important for me to understand in order to push the work further: yes.
To pinch a phrase from poet Elizabeth Bishop, production of the work becomes a process of ‘driving to the interior’ – the work is not expressly about me and nor do I want it to be, but it would be foolish to ignore that ultimately, it comes out of me. A measure of uncovering where in particular its coming from can only be beneficial to its production. This idea of an honest synthesis enabling a sustainable practice is at the head of a list of important lessons that I will be clutching close as I imurge from university.
The rest of the list reads as follows;