In the final year there has been a large amount of work that I did not expect would affect me so much, what with creating the research plan last year I didn’t realise how much work I still had left to do. I did originally plan to have the whole dissertation done before Christmas as I had done lots of work over the summer, however the chapter I have struggled on the most held me back. This is something that in hindsight I would try and do better, and if I was to ever write a piece like this again I would attempt to get it done a lot more in advanced. However, I did think that the overall satisfaction of having a finalised piece of work was worth it.
Over the whole three year experience there has been a wide variety of topics available, in the first year I was involved in the subculture group with Cath, this involved topics I was not familiar with and didn’t particularly share an interest in, and then followed this up with the After Modernism group with Jon, this was a very useful study group to be a part of and I found that it really helped with my practice and also with my general art knowledge. In the second year I was moved into a study group of which I didn’t enjoy and then applied for the action to move study groups, into the learning from contemporary art group. When I was in this group it was a follow up from the After Modernism group, this meant that I was able to enhance my practice and knowledge further.
During the second part of the term in second year we were given the task to write our research plan for the dissertation and we had to involve some key research and some writing towards our work, this was very helpful and also enabled the start of the dissertation writing process. In this I started to look at the works of Josef Albers, John Gage and David Bachelor, all crucial to the initial understanding of my dissertation. Starting the work at the end of the second term was really useful as it gave the perfect opportunity to get some time to study over the summer, this enabled good time to change the title of the dissertation, of which I did.
In the second year I focused on the piece Pink Tons by Roni Horn, this piece was the original link to my practice and dissertation work, I was originally inspired by the links to gender and colour, as the piece was designed to be masculine in size and weight and feminine in colour, this idea was something that inspired me as there are issues in the present day that reflect on the piece. Why was the colour pink linked to femininity? But this is something I decided to change on reflection for my dissertation question, it would be been too hard to answer this question, this is because initially I had plans to do experiments and also access the information from large galleries, who said that it was information I could not access as there was no strong opinion on the question I initially proposed.
I think that the progress I have made over the years is quite substantial, I have a more critical view on artwork now, and have attended all of the big question lectures ad critical debates to also further enhance my experience. the critical debates helped especially as we were given the chance to have an input on what we wanted to see in the coming weeks lectures. This has also allowed me to have a better method in looking into artist of which have inspired me in my practice, it has given me the knowledge in more artists and has also enabled me the skill of picking suitable artists and resources, this skill has been reflected in my practice and my other writing.
If there was anything I could have changed about the constellation experience it would be the fact that there was no mini assignments in preparation of the dissertation, the fact that we were not writing regularly made the whole experience baffling every time a ‘big’ deadline was about to come around. If we had to submit even a 10000 word essay every week/month I feel this would have helped with the ability to research and type. Also another element I would change would be the tutorial types over the last term, I think it still would have been nice to have a small group tutorial or lecture in the last year, as the last ones we had were halfway through second year.
Something that I will note for the future is the amount of planning that I like to do as a person, and that I now know the best ways in which I work, I have developed an effective way of note taking and also know how to successfully reference in my writing. I think that if I had the opportunity to do another thesis I would potentially take more time to make sure it linked to my practice more so that I could enjoy the research and writing process more, as if it was something I was more interested in I would have completed it a lot quicker. I think that overall I have had a pretty good experience in constellation and have enjoyed learning about the topics I have chosen and am very satisfied with the dissertation I have come to write.
Alexandra Fine Art 