SPEECH SCRIPT:
Hi everyone! In my presentation I’m going to talk a little bit about what I’ve learnt this year, how I’m trying to find my place in the creative industries, and what I’m aiming to achieve in the future.
So starting with one of the biggest things I did this year, my involvement in the Colours May Vary show.
COLOURS MAY VARY: The Colours May Vary exhibition was really important for me. To explain the growth I’ve made this year, I want to explain where I started. Before uni, I used to be a really reserved anxious person. I was scared of anything I hadn’t done before, I had no confidence in myself. So I’d never try anything new for fear of failure. I always stuck to my comfort zone. And because of that I never got better, never grew, never changed.
When I came to uni I wanted to change this because it was holding me back. In first year I definitely pushed myself and grew. I wanted to try difficult things, things that made me really anxious, or things I knew I wasn’t good at.
From doing this I’ve started to love being in these situations that i”m not sure of. I’ve discovered I like learning, I like pushing myself, I like the weird growing pains you get when you’re grappling with something difficult. I’ve discovered a lot about myself and my practice by being more adventurous.
So I decided to try and put myself forward to be the ‘organiser’ on our part of the Colour May Vary show, something I had absolutely no experience in.
Doing this helped me really get a sense of how much work goes into an exhibition, and how to properly conduct yourself when working in the professional world. I was sending loads of emails everyday, trying to make sure everyone knew what they were doing, and trying to always be professional.I didn’t want to be the reason the whole event went poorly, so I really tried to be super efficient and get everything sorted on time.
Everyone put in loads of hard work and I think it paid off! I was ridiculously stressed the whole time because I was sure I was going to mess something up, but I actually found I really enjoyed being in charge. This role made it obvious to me that I’m a perfectionist, and I’m neurotic person. Because of this I really excel in organisational roles. I’m glad I did this because I now know that in the future I’d love to organise events, or curate exhibitions, or just tell people what to do. Being organised and in charge is my thing, and I’m glad I’ve realised that.
FUZZY LOGIC: More recently, I designed the poster for the fuzzy logic ball after party. I’ve never done a proper event poster, but I was interested in having a go so I decided to challenge myself again with something new. I got this opportunity by showing some of my work I did for the hookworms brief and proposing how I’d use the artwork to create a new concept. This was a quick turn around, super fun to do, and I’m really happy with the work. I was surprised but pleased, because by doing this I realised I quite enjoyed a simple, quick, kind of commercial job like designing a poster. I thought advertising and posters wasn’t a place I would really work in illustration, but this made me think again about it.
GIRL GANG LEEDS: I’ve also been focusing on trying to get involved in the Leeds art community and work on my professionalism outside uni. In an attempt to get some practical selling knowledge and make contacts and friends, I’ve been selling at art markets and on Etsy. I’ve sold at girl gang art market twice now, both times selling a few different people’s work, as well as my own.
I’ve always been the head of the table, organising money and stock sheets and our display. From doing these markets I’ve learnt a lot about marketing and selling yourself. Everyone else has so much personal branding to make sure you can’t leave without knowing who they are. I’m doing the art market in a week or two and for that I’ve tried to make my branding cohesive and make sure my work is easy to find online.
CONTACT REPORT: Now onto my PP work this year! For my contact report, I approached Hey Ho Print Co. They describe themselves as ‘an open-access educational and resource centre dedicated to printed arts and design.’. They host workshops in various craft and print based activities. I approached them because they’re based in Saltburn, which is close to where I’m from back home up north. I wanted to investigate how they’d approached starting a creative business, and how they work as a creative person in my home area. I’ve always been told that being creative in my home town was never possible, there’s not enough money or opportunities or even a real audience for it. However, there’s definitely a small art community that I’d love to be a part of in the future (especially over summer) so I questioned them about this. I asked about how they work with creatives in the area, how they find the work they sell, and why they’re still based in a small town instead of moving to a city.
Sophie, who I talked to, works as a graphic designer and told me most of her work actually comes from Teesside. She told me that Hey Ho brings in all kinds of people, and because of its location creatives in the area find it on their own and a community has grow around them. Learning about Hey Ho’s story and growth really inspired me to try and get involved in my local area as well as Leeds.
COLLAB: My collab group was called Ey Up! and we were a diy small press, focusing on showcasing independent businesses in Leeds through free illustrated zines. While I could say a lot about this project, I want to talk specifically about what was new for me and the important things I learnt. Firstly, I took on the more business side of our research. Costing up our project, finding printers, and working out how we could earn money. In my own practice I’ve never been too business savvy. I do sell at print fairs and online, but I could really improve on the finance side of things. I think working through all of this with spreadsheets and looking at grants, really helped me realise how I could organise and manage my own practice more professionally. As well as this, it made me think about actually proposing my creative ideas. If there’s something I’d like to do, I could write a proposal and ask for funding. I could try to make it a real professional plan, and it could actually work. Now that I’m thinking about events managing and curation, I think being open to proposing my ideas could really further my practice.
COP: my COP project this year has really changed my practice and COP is kind of becoming my favourite module. To explain what I did briefly: my work was inspired by this weird book called ‘The Age of Wire and String’, and in that book the author basically tells a story of these people and their history. The main point is that the language is distorted and warped and abstracted. It makes no sense really but you get this amazing experience from being immersed in this narrative you can’t fully decode. The illustrations are equally hard to read and vague, but it all works together to create a really interesting narrative.
so in my project I did a similar thing with my illustrations, but focusing on my natural landscape at home, because I’ve always loved it. It’s kind of the centre of town, but also kind of ignored and forgotten. I think the relationship people have with it is really cool, and I wanted to create a story around this. So it was loosely based on the beach, but the language and imagery separated it and abstracted it so it became ambiguous and new.
From this project, I realised I love working with narrative, but I don’t want to illustrate what’s already written. My practice is starting to become based on this idea of working with text in this ambiguous way. I want to focus on mood and tone and atmosphere, and taking a death of the author approach I just want to focus on the fact that there is no specific reading. It’s whatever the audience gets from it. It’s kind of a post modern approach, and something I’m still trying to learn more about and find the right language for. Research is also something I really enjoy. This project took a look of documenting, visiting, recording and all that really helped me with my image making and getting a feel for that mood I wanted. Overall COP was really influential for my practice, helping me find out things that are important to my work and also the kind of context my work might fall into. Narrative is my happy place but I think I’m trying to do something innovative inside it.
504: 504, on the other hand, was a struggle for me this year. I tried to take all I’d learnt about illustrating text and my practice from COP into this project, but I was working with a completely different kind of text. It was a story, it was super descriptive, and it was for an all ages audience so I wanted it to be appropriate. I basically did everything I just talked about not doing in my COP. I think I did this because I was illustrating four specific double page spreads, and got too worried about matching images to specific sentences. I got stressed about it reading like a book, instead of using the context of a book to do something interesting. I was pretty disappointed in my work, I thought it was boring, stagnant, and just mirroring the text. It didn’t have any of that quality I was trying to reach, because I became unconfident in my approach. I thought that ‘children’s books don’t work that way’.
When Laura Carlin came into talk, everything she said was literally everything I’ve been feeling recently. Her talk actually really helped me feel like the struggle I was having was important to my growth, and not just a failure.
Everything she was trying to do with children’s books was what I wanted to be doing. Pushing the audience, not patronising them. Making poignant, sensitive work. Not just illustrating the text. Telling a story with pictures not just words.
The talk made me think that books, and specifically children’s books, could actually really be for me, and that it might be something I want to try and approach in the future. I’ve always been nervous of books, and I think it shows in this work, but I think it could actually be a good place for my illustration. I think I just need some time to settle into it.
THIRD YEAR:
For my future plan, I’d love to take the stories I found in 504, there’s about 5 or 6, and use them as some material to make content from. I’m hoping I can continue to experiment with narrative and explore publishing as a place for my practice.
I’m also thinking about writing some proposals for ideas I have or trying to get involved in creative events. My COP and Contact Report really made me think about my home and how I wish there was more going on creatively in that area. I’m not sure what I’d like to do yet, but I’d love to do something creative to benefit the community so over summer I’m going to try and write a proposal for that. Maybe creative workshops with kids, or something to liven up some of our area.
Another small goal is to become more well read. I know my practice really benefits when I’m full of references and inspiration. From working with a lot of written fiction this year, it's made me feel like I need to get back into reading and literature again. History, reading and writing used to be a big part of my personality, and I think it would enrich my practice.
My plans for next year aren’t really pinned down, but I want to take the summer to concrete what I really want. Some goals I do have are: travel, improve my online presence, get some creative real jobs, maybe do an internship, get more tattoos, learn to cook better, and start writing again. These are all quite vague but all things that feed into my practice in small ways. I've definitely learnt a lot this year, and grown a lot, but I'm hoping to grow even more next year.
Thank you for listening, that's everything I have to say. Any questions?
