Holding On, Letting Go & Second Life Project

In this project, I started my ideas with gallery visits, research through various texts and a mind map. After the final pieces were done for both projects, which were ‘Holding On, Letting Go’ and ‘Second Life’, I participated in a seminar for each of them. These helped me follow on and develop my ideas, which involved discussions with fellow colleagues about their work and received feedback from them on my work. There were also tutors involved who helped express their opinions along with others, recommend artists and help within development for my ideas. It helped a lot as my final pieces included text with photographs, which is the first time that I have ever used this method. In my opinion, it worked well and I plan on researching into it and working with this method more.

The feedback that I gained had a lot of comments and views on the sentences and text. In ‘Holding On, Letting Go’, I was told that the gaps between the words make the sentence ‘Wish You Were Here’ look longing and poetic. The image along side the text gave a sense of campaign. In ‘Second Life’ I had much better feedback. I will obviously use this feedback to carry on the process of ideas within my research and work. The text gave the idea of lost loved one’s, sense of loss and emptiness, and afterlife. The photographs that I chose to use along side the text definitely played a big part on the sentences. They helped send the messages across to my colleagues, tutors and other viewers. They also served a purpose by identifying how I feel while thinking the phrases. For example, wish you were closer not distant, anticipation and patience for time, the loved one’s are still there but you can’t see them, and hazy memories.

I plan on taking these ideas further with a choice of methods. The methods or medium that I may use in my next work could possibly involve using mechanical cameras, light boxes, dark room development, video installation, photograms or change of colour themes in the photographs, but staying on the subject of text. I will be researching more into these ideas with the help of contextual and artist references and gallery visits to help me move onto the next stage. I will develop onto my next works possibly with the help from the public to find out how they deal with the emotions of losing loved one’s and transfer my works into their context. In my recent final pieces, the messages were quite personal which people did just about understand but they did not understand the deeper meaning as those quotes run through my thoughts at some point in every single day.