Tuesday 10 May 2016

'Please show your working in the margin of your exam paper'


At the moment I'm doing a lot of packing and throwing away in preparation for moving house, which is giving me some distance from the work process that I've been doggedly pursuing since 2009. My main strategy has been to ignore what everyone else is doing and focus.

Along the way I wrote a blog called Exploring Creativity (exploring-creativity-tamsin.blogspot.co.uk) for about five years. Its purpose was to document myself as guinea pig for a study of how a lifelong desire to play music and make art could result in so many years of not doing, and so many blocks to doing even after I started again.

After some years I felt that the time had come to move on from thinking and talking about the nature of blocks to creativity, and decided to shift my blog focus to writing about the intentions of and influences on the actual work that I was now doing. This was part of my previous website (tamsinhaggis.blogspot.co.uk). It wasn't very systematic, and dropped away over time.

So...at this time of change and renewal, I'm currently considering starting up a more regular blog writing practice, the intention of which would be to record, in a scrappy and non-linear way, the various practices, influences, and events that feed in to the images that appear.

I've tended not to want to talk about what's behind my images, because it feels important to me that they're there, naked, as it were, for different people's imaginations to respond to and possibly feed off.

But I'm currently reading 'Show Your Work' by Austin Kleon, and he suggests that in fact people who are interested in your work are also often interested in the processes that lie behind the 'products' that appear. I don't know if this is true, but perhaps it's time to give it a go.

http://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/

Tomorrow I will watch what happens and consider a first attempt at documenting my working.


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