Art-dentity Crisis!

Last week, I was faced with a bit of an art-dentity crisis. I had a Directed Study meeting with Scott on Friday, so I set up my new pieces from Wednesday night's life drawing class to show him.

I hadn't been very inspired on Wednesday night. I'd been tired and easily distracted, and found it hard to focus on the pieces I was working on. A number of times they were incomplete because I thought the poses were going to be longer than they ended up being. Based on these things, I didn't have very much to say.

I think that my exasperation was evident, and so Scott did what he does best: he asked all the hard questions. He doesn't necessarily expect answers to them all, but still he asks to get you thinking. Not only thinking, but getting your brain reeling. I'm sure if he wanted to, he could make you question your own identity ten times over. Now, he was making me question my art-dentity.

He asked: What are you trying to achieve? Where do you go from here?

I thought I had come up with a beginning of an answer last week to at least one of these questions, but I was slowly coming to the realization that I had been researching ideas that were actually moving me further and further away from the point of what I'd started. The idea of working with the clay in a temporal and fleeting way was my focus, and if I were to move the pieces beyond that, through drying and glazing, I would lose all of the intended value of the initial process.

He asked: How are these relevant? What does it mean for these to be made by Melanie?

I'm in my fourth year of visual arts, and this is the first time I've been confronted with these kinds of questions. Next semester, I'm supposed to compile my graduating project, a comprehensive body of work that will be hung in the Nanaimo Art Gallery along with several other students' work. I'm wondering, why hasn't the issue of personal direction, beyond the mere satisfaction of project requirements, been acknowledged more before now? And because I've never really thought to ask myself these things... who am I as an artist, anyway?


So I did a bit of musing on this subject. How do I do art?

- I often find myself feeling creatively inspired, but I'm not always able to translate the feeling/the moment into something tangible. It's usually that an inner need to satisfy the moment gets fulfilled.

- I'm not a very big planner. I don't draw hundreds of sketches before starting something. Often, it's just one sketch, or just starting with just an an idea in my head.

- I enjoy photography when it's spontaneous, like travel photography. I enjoy using natural light, and am usually a little intimidated by studio lighting. Too technical!

- I like using my hands! I like for the medium to be tangible, and to feel close to what I'm doing.

So there seems to be this theme of spontaneity, the temporal, and working with my hands. But I've also come to the realization that working with one thing for too long allows me the chance to lose momentum.

Well, I got a second wind last night by moving into another medium: photography. Though I've already taken pictures of most of my pieces, I approached them again with more attention than mere documentation. I set up a little miniature studio with two small desk lamps and a black scarf as a backdrop. The idea was to capture the pieces in their wet state so that they retain the details from their creation, the temporal and spontaneous environment in which they were made. In this way, I hope to enhance as well as emphasize their value in this state.

These photos are just initial studies, and I hope to go into some more depth with this exploration. I would also like to do some drawings of the figures, or do drawings from the photographs, and perhaps then photograph those drawings... experimenting with the ways each medium can lend to the other.

I still don't know exactly where I'm going, but I'm gradually figuring out the how and the why in order to create more purpose within my work, so that I can take ownership of what I'm doing. Which means, more questions, more musings, and more self-exploration.