Lines of Enquiry for Unit X

 

Unit X has been a collaborative project that has extended the aims that I have had to carry out. Some aspects of collaboration have been meeting up with a group of artists from different courses to all create an exhibition towards a chosen theme. I have chosen the theme of 'Appropriation' throughout this project and in the beginning created a Facebook group for I and the people I worked with to discuss ideas and post about group meetings we attended in. The collaborative work and development has been affected by attendance to the meetings. The same people would show up week after week, but after a while we pulled the fragments of each meeting together and created a publication together. It started off as an idea we could work together on, and when it was finally produced , it felt relieving that we made a collaborative piece that combined all of our takes upon 'Appropriation'.

Throughout Unit X there were key developments within our group that I noticed. As we all got to know each other a bit better, we grew more confident in organising meetings. The key meeting I remember was when we went around each individuals studio to see he work they had produced for Unit X and held our own group crit without the guidance of a tutor.

I developed myself as an artist from these group crits as the perspective of another on the pieces I was making, and the ideas I had, pushed me on to re-work the pieces so that they worked better from suggestion of others.

I also was inspired to want to collaborate in the future with other artists on my course. I found that talking to a group of people I don't know very well helped my confidence and I even helped out a 3rd year with her piece. Unit X has allowed me to meet new people, which leads to new links and opportunities.

The creative responses I took to this project have all been under the context of 'Appropriation'. I looked at performance artists that I felt linked back to this idea, and engaged myself in a workshop with a performance artist to develop my own skills within this medium. It was I who came up with the idea for a collaborative publication with the group of people I have worked with for this project which turned out successful. I did use my original practice of work of film and photography to experiment with appropriation of the body with my 'Statue of David' video.

If I had more time with this project I would have organised time better, as I felt that the setup of the exhibition could've taken lesser time if we had better attendance and a readymade layout of the exhibition. I personally could have experimented with different mediums in which to display my work. I'd of liked to show my 'Statue of David' video as a projection, but due to lack of equipment, I was unable.

Overall I hope that after the exhibition I can continue to use the skills of collaboration I have created during Unit X to make work with others.