DEGREES UNEDITED

# 5 [4 November 2008]

Taking Chances

At the beginning of this final year, we were told about taking chances, about how being as ambitious as possible is the only way to make this year work--it’s the only way to have a successful little corner of the degree show with your name painted on the wall next to your best, most exciting work with the extensive research and documentation to back it up and make it valid. I have looked on my work that I have done so far and don’t think that I have been taking chances here. People look at me and tell me that I must be afraid to take chances, that I should stop over-thinking about it and just do something. I have not come from foundation courses; I come from a very personal space where it was necessary for me to dig myself out of a closed-off world with art. I wrote, I drew all sorts of funny drawings I shared them across the ocean with other artists. I tried to use art as a way…not to be safe. From my late teens to my mid twenties I was trying to become part of the world. I was going against what my parents wanted me to do—to be safe, to stay put. I was involved in a couple of shows. I “put myself out there”. But was I really taking chances? At 32, having had a career in alternative health for 8 years and knowing it wasn’t really all that I wanted or needed and risking everything to move thousands of miles away from my rather unsupportive family not seeing them for years on end, spending all my savings and putting myself into a life-time of debt for a degree that most people tell me will make me unemployable…all for a love, for the need for total change, for the need of adventure. Am I not capable of taking chances? It shouldn’t be so hard to do this—to get started in this year. To make the ambitious work that everyone expects from me! Why am so afraid???

# 4 [20 October 2008]

the degree show-part 1

Time—there will be a lot to see—A LOT. With my experiences of walking through Degree Shows at my university with floors and floors of work, rooms absolutely packed full—how much time do you ask of the viewer to spend on your piece? If someone comes to this show and plans to be there for a maximum time of one hour and see everything presented in its entirety—how much time will this person have to spend on your work? Perhaps none? If the work doesn’t strike the viewer down in a two second moment then will they move on to the next piece? I don’t think that it’s right to create work primarily to get someone’s attention—unless that’s the point of the work (hey, maybe I should change my Statement of Intent?) but I think that the volume of work displayed should be taken in hand. I might be moving over to text-based work (maybe), but I don’t want to create a piece that requires a lot of study or reading-time—people just don’t have the patience—I don’t have the patience for work that ask too much of me at times. There needs to be something special—something “simple” perhaps, that grabs you first and then maybe—maybe—we will try to delve more deeply into the work. I must admit that when I walk passed a work without a thought as it’s left me cold in the two seconds that I allowed for it to grab me—I have a great fear in me that wells up that this will be the way my work will be approached. Maybe nothing can be done about it. Just continue on trying to create work that holds my attention! Now there’s a challenge!

# 3 [14 October 2008]

This early hour

Yesterday was the first day of the final year. I made sure to get on the bus and try to get to University as early as I could as it was “Space Allocation Day”—a day where everyone scrambles for more than their fair share of work tables and establishes their space next to their mates space, completely ignoring the area that they have been given by Fine Art staff. I ran in to the building at 9ish and found all three years running around like hyper enthusiastic honey bees ready to make their best art work yet, scrambling to their spaces! I spoke to some nervous students, still unsure about what they feel they are meant to do here. I said that, I think it’s hard—we are meant to do what is right for us and yet on the other hand it is a degree course and if we didn’t feel that that was an important aspect of all of this, then why are we here? If all we ever wanted to do was just “create art”—then why are we here? The students with a degree on their minds—can you tell who is who? I imagine that many of the people on my course have been busy thinking of what their degree show piece will be and they have arrived here ready to start work on that one final piece (final?)—they have wasted no time bringing in bits of wood and other supplies, ready to get to it! I asked one of the girls on my course if she planned on working on the same piece all the way through the year “Yes!” she said, “Of course!” as if I was strange for asking. I told her that I wasn’t sure if that is what I should to. “Yes! Definitely do it!” She said exuberantly. I’m just not sure if that is what I should do. I roamed around the many levels of the Fine Art building looking for a space for me. I knew the area I was meant to be in, but like last year—I knew there would already be someone else there, setting up next to someone else they wanted to spend the year with. All the walls and corners were already filled, piles and piles of chairs stood stacked ready to be places around the building where the students see fit and all the work tables were taken. Even at this early hour. Even at this early hour…it’s getting so late and close to the end.

# 2 [20 August 2008]

That Inner Dialogue

I have been trying to focus and visualize myself as being productive; as being someone who is able to move forward and not get caught up in emotional traps and the problems of daily life. I can remember the other times in my life when things seemed to have occurred in a way that seemed to bring success or the reaching of goals and I can remember that I put a fire under myself, that I did not make excuses and that I changed my thoughts. That is—I changed my “inner dialogue”. I pulled myself out of whatever hole I was in and stopped telling myself that I could not “do” and that I would progress. Things would then happen. But it’s such a very, very delicate place to be—being on the edge of not believing in yourself and having total faith that something will happen if you just jump and don’t think about the jumping. You can forget as you fall how you knew that it would be okay as you open your eyes and see the ground coming toward you. But in the last couple of days I have been drinking my coffee and I have been telling myself things in constant reiteration as I walk down the street such as, “you can focus”, “you will be creative”, “you won’t waste your time”, etc, etc…and my sketchbooks have been filling up and I did stay up until 2:30 last night making funny things on my computer. I did over-sleep, but I suppose things won’t always be perfect!

The time has come to enrol for the final year. I could go on the university website right now and do it online. Yet, I just can’t seem to...yet.

# 1 [19 August 2008]

Getting There

I am faced with great financial…difficulty—because I was, perhaps, dreaming “beyond my means”. So, this degree show is, to me, not so horrifying because I am not sure if it will go well; if I will get a good mark, if I will show the world that I can be a “real” artist, but it is more the fear that I will never even make it that far at all because of money. I always say that I will find a way but, time is running out so fast and here I am still…without enough. I don’t want this blog to be about my financial strife, but I need everyone to know that it is something that has loomed behind all the work that I have done so far at university—it’s sometimes that has helped me create work at times but more often it has been a horrible distraction that has taken up all my time and concentration and focus so that I have not done as well as I know that I could have, so that I have…in my eyes…failed at a lot of things that I have attempted.

I haven’t even given myself the chance to look away from it all and be able to really see what kind of artist I am! I thought that I knew, but times are so changeable, erratic and unstable that it is hard to prop oneself up against a safe wall of “knowing”…anything.

I have come here on my own after years of trying other jobs and trying to be things, at times, that I am not. Off and on I have found myself in art, and that has been a great feeling—it might have been performing, it might have been drawing or painting or writing—it didn’t really matter, because…it was “me”. Well, now art counts more than it ever has—it is now meant to be an immense part of my life at the moment. I am meant to be submerging myself in an ocean of artistic creativity! That’s what being here is all about! That’s what going to university and getting a degree is supposed to be about—creating more than you ever have, learning more about yourself than you ever knew!

Tuition fees have gone up for me this year and all my savings from my other job of eight years have run out and all my loans are gone. Today I will try the final step in trying to get another government loan—but it won’t be enough. It will pay for one term at best. The conversion rate of US dollars into British pounds is laughable.

I don’t know where I will end up or if I will end up where I am meant to be. I’ve only ever followed my dreams, no-matter how implausible they might have been…I suppose nothing has changed…it all seems so unlikely, yet…here I go.