The end of year exhibition, it was very tedious and there was a lot of work to put in, I attended 2 out of the 3 days of install, as well as the whole day of the private view, and invigilation and the deinstall, so it was a lot of work but in the end it was worth it, I'm pretty proud of how our exhibition came out and we had a lot of people show up for the private view and the public view too. The venue looked pretty nice, but the walls were very hard to work with, there was experimenting with command strips but eventually we made it work and I got my work up. There were a lot of things to consider with composition for example I was buy an electric box thing on the wall as well as above a fireplace, so I took extra consideration in aligning all my paintings so everything was framed nicely and it looked aesthetic. In the end i really like how my pieces looked, they had enough space each so they weren't taken the attention from each other ad I had some interesting and fun conversations about the work with people looking at it.

Recently I attended an induction workshop for dry point printing and I feel like it was a revelation for my practice. during the induction I was very excited as I was learning about the kind of printing that it is, its more of a sketchy and looser style of printing compared to Lino printing for example, but I felt that I could be more precise with the process than when using monoprint. I really like the freedom of potential materials to carve into, as we had the option of using cut open cartons or slightly "fancier" plastic sheets we can buy form the paper store. I like these options because if I want something bigger and sturdier for a final piece of work I have access to it but for the most part I can use recycled cartons I bring in or that are provided and I believe its good to recycle and reuse when possible, also I really love the effect I can get from etching into the cartons so its very much a win win situation.

I've had a lot of fun experimenting with painting styles and whilst I struggled at first to figure out what I wanted to depict specifically when it came to the characterisations of the fear responses, I eventually figured out what animal characteristics, colours and other details to include in my paintings and the more I painted the more I understood what I wanted to do compositionally. For example I've learnt that I've struggled with having multiple characters in the same painting especially interacting, so I've focused on having paintings with just one character in at once, but maybe I should also work on this more in the future.

On Thursday (01/01/2024) In attended a gestural monoprint workshop, I was really excited about this as I had been meaning to book more print workshops and learn about more printing techniques. I really enjoyed this workshop as it was primarily about being gestural and loose with creating the prints, it was impossible to focus on details and i mainly concentrated on being loose and mark making. I was able to make some really intriguing prints with beautiful marks, the technician also spoke about chiaroscuro, so i tried to focus on light and darks and shading in a lot of my prints, (as typically i am very line and shape based), It was a brilliant experiance and i feel like with just one workshop it has opened my eyes in terms of how to approach making a piece of work. I also plan to attend more printing technique workshops this year.

Land Workshop with Molly - In this workshop we focused on molly practice and her work which involved a lot of about where she lived and using found objects like rocks and moss etc. she also uses a lot of symbols and sigils in her work and for this workshop we were to create our own symbol out of sand and also draw with sand. This was fun and interesting, working with such a foreign medium was a challenge but vey enlightening as I never thought I could draw or make art with something like sand. I really enjoyed meticulously making shapes and flattening out the sand and making all the grains of sand neat and I feel like the end product was quite unique at least in terms of what I'm use to creating. We were also giving the options of a lot of objects to include from the land majoritively , such as moss, seaweed, rocks etc. I decided to include some graves which molly had brought as I felt my symbols looked sort of witchy or gothic and I felt the graves and desaturated moss would help and a spooky atmosphere.

In todays session my lecturer spoke about phenomenonology and sound, and how sound is an underrated medium. The instructions for this session and task were to grab ink and paper and some sort of utensil and to make marks in response to the sounds my lecturer was going to play (a mixture of music and sound pieces created by my lecturer). There was a big emphasis on really listening to and feeling the sounds whilst mark making. It was an interesting experience to me, initially I found that I made associations with the sounds I was hearing and I felt I should be responding. I felt like when gentle piano music was playing I had to respond with dainty and gentle mark making and vice versa. I noticed this and tried to also repel that notion and see what would happen if I just felt the sound and put brush to paper and tried to make marks in terms of a response that I felt made opposed to the associations my brain was making. These images are a result of this task. I especially like the piece on the left, I remember that the noise that was playing whilst I was mark making on this piece was shockingly loud and the speaker wasn't a super high quality so the sound wasn't necessarily pleasant. and it created such a visceral and immediate response from me I almost didn't have to think about the marks I was making, I just did. And whilst I don't know how I feel like the urgency of the brushstrokes does successfully convey how I felt when I made them as well as the nature of the sound piece that was playing to an extent.

In a recent session with my professor we discussed what makes a "professional artist" and this discussion led to a lot of ideas. For example is a professional artists someone who makes art for their career and makes money out of it or are they only a professional artists if they have a degree and qualifications or does none of that matter. After this as a class we were told to go out and make a piece of work responding to the "straight line" I didn't know whether this task was related to the previous discussion or not but either way my brain was churning and i decided to interpret the task in a metaphorical way. What I mean by this is I was think of what the straight line could mean and my thoughts led me to a place of thinking that "the straight line" could be the directions society leads us in our whole life. For example how every child is encouraged to go to school and get grades and then go to university and get a degree and then work and then family, arguably there is this set of ideals to what we should all be doing this "straight line" we should be following.