I submitted a couple of weeks ago as planned the project plan as SYP 1 (first time through the new VLE platform), now had the tutorial and received the finalised tutor report, all added to this post.
I wrote the project plan alongside the PaR workshop series in which I unpicked my working methodology, and alongside the various exercises for part 1.
The plan is functional as such:
The two key items in the plan are aims as well as audience considerations, which I both add here (and see the document below for the fuller plan).
Aims and objectives
I intend to develop my BoW, For Cover, as PaR (i.e. alongside the Research module) towards a toolkit, testing its versatility and mobility.
This toolkit intends to:
- present a mobile and versatile PaR, combining the various practices (such as drawing, writing, lens-based and performance work) into elements that can test the methodology of For Cover in different sites and contexts:
- it will include a digital platform/space to act as an open container that can grow alongside the practice;
- it will also include a material, analogue, element, such as a small edition set of different self-assemble elements to engage with For Cover across a distributed space and as private performance (i.e. a loosely understood artist book in a box or similar);
- thirdly I will test the viability to revisit the actual site for a public performance/event in autumn.
One key element for developing this towards a professional practice lies in pursuing residency applications and settings. My intention is to network by applying for relevant residencies during SYP and by using both application development and perhaps residency itself for articulating my professional practice as mobile toolkit.
The second element is constituted by articulating relevant and suitable forms of engagement for this work, its methodology and thus for myself as practising artist (in visual, textual and spoken form). I want this to further strengthen the ways in which I engage with others in this work and through this work (please see below under Audience for further details).
Audience
The work has public relevance and needs a public presence. Who this public in fact is besides a gallery-visiting audience (online/offline)needs further clarification.
There are peers, curators, cultural practitioners as well academics across the fields of creative and performative practice, geography and social science as well as interested in PaR and methodology for whom the work has relevance. Engagement here will help to develop my artistic visibility within the field.
There is also an interested public for whom PaR, a methodological focus as well as the particular substantive focus of the work and its realisation will hold interest and relevance. These in part sit remotely for the time being, in future possibly also in relevant public/charitable artistic spaces and exhibition contexts.
Thirdly, there are passers-by and chancers-upon who encounter the work through its site-specificity. And while this isn’t an intended audience, they hover between participants and audience. I would like to consider a form of visibility in this general, distributed and possibly uninterested field also.
Permissions for the time being are largely self generated: website space, social media access, the communication with existing networks and those to be developed; for the siting of an event/performance I would like to seek clearance with the landowner (although existing usage rights don’t necessarily require these).
The tutorial was again inspiring and generative, I write the minutes as during Research, although they now need to fit within a set of Learning Objectives.
The discussion around audience is key, as is the question of distance to site, work, myself and audience. I propose to conduct SYP as series of research enquiries (rather than a to do list).
I add the respective sections (audience and site/distance) here, the report in full again below as attachment.
How to understand audience outside a gallery exhibition context?
Challenge of writing around the idea of SYP as exhibition.
This is a functional project plan: how does my practice fit within that and where does it really push at the boundaries.
For this plan, Rachel observes that the concern over audience is really the most interesting area to focus on it: Who is the audience and in what form does the work engage whom, how and where? The instructions and how to push the form between you and the audience; when do you want to be open and revealing; when quite closed and secretive.
If this work is relational, it is concerned with various relationship forms: actants, matters; public, private, reveal and conceal. The concern of the engagement plan is the how and why, and it can be bristly.
At the provocative end, Rachel suggests that I could argue that the material is in fact the audience, seeing the new materialist and post-humanist aspects of the work.
If I stay here, in this place, my teenage home, longer, how does the village figure in relationship to the work: not quite as audience but as marker, as reference.
[While I was making the work of course too] The village book as narrative and a contribution of my work (with an instruction to build a drawing machine) for its culture section. ‘The village would love to know about the mysterious woman who goes to the wood’.
R: And in years to come people will look back at these instructions as a point in the lineage.
The village not as audience but it rubs along it; there is something generous with how the village is towards me as the only one visible person of our family.
Current research/site work:
I clipped three empty sketchbook pages underneath the fir (and this is where the PaR workshop was really useful: to try out that research/object line); I have only been three times since I left it there ten days ago (the dynamics of the whole site have changed, besides the horseflies). I built a cover for myself, this little shelter with almost nothing, and this works. This is a durational work across this time.
The site as a site for installing the work from last Winter: in May for the installation may be all that it has been. It may not work as a public event this autumn as initially envisaged.
R: To raise a question: for you and others who work with site is the big question: where is the work? What is the work? And a lot of people will only ever see the documentation. There are the audio pieces too but they are of the site, don’t necessarily need to be experienced in site.
Where is the site, where is the work, where is the audience? Is the engagement with you, the site the work and the question of how it works in proximity to the site. (27:00)
These don’t fall all into each other: site, work, I, audience.
It isn’t about near space but contextual distance; these aren’t the same but the distance is being negotiated within the work.
The concept of a toolbox is helpful: I can pick it up; so perhaps a mobile: what constellation does it all have, how does it move. Some of the distance is structural but some is moved by wind.
Also: role of time being slow and fast and what that does for proximity.
I have a set of action points:
- to work through the analogue/digital forms and
- to devise and pursue audience and site/distance as enquiries.
The plan is to submit SYP 2 (Revising my work) for late September.
Research | Body of Work | Sustain Your Practice 
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