Unit 2 Assessment

A Guide to navigating this page

In organising this page, I have taken into account the fact that many of the posts fall under two or sometimes three of the learning outcomes. With clarity and ease of reading in mind, and the desire to avoid the needless duplication of post links, I decided to group the posts according to their principal area of interest.

• Posts are listed in ascending chronological order to help evidence the evolution of the process.
• Dates are indicative of publication; mostly coinciding with the completion of the post.
• A synopsis is given under each link to help orientate the context.
• Where necessary, Unit 1 posts are listed to help contextualise the process.

Assessment criteria

---

Project Proposal

The course began with an initial project idea which soon formalised into a project proposal. This has been continually modified, each iteration marking a significant point in the development of the project itself. The coronavirus lockdown has had a significant impact on the delivery of the proposal. Aspects of it have been suspended allowing space for the development of opportunities to explore new ways of working. I do not consider its present form as final but rather resolved. Treated as a living document it will continue to evolve and play a part in my future practice.

Link to Project Proposal

---

Symposium 2 Video

The Symposium video published at the end of May holistically encapsulates the learning outcomes.

---

Critical evaluation of the MA and future plans.

Critical Evaluation

1 Jul 20
A summing up of the course in under 5oo words.

---

Ideas for New Work 1

9 May 20
Dealing with the changes in the project from a physical to online show, new ideas come to mind: the beginning of a list of projects for after the MA.

Formulation of future plans to continue my personal and professional development

15 Jun 20
Non-commercial plans for future work; continuing and evolving what I have done during the MA.

What I would have like to have done but did not

26 Jun 20
A brief outline of some future plans and ideas based on what I have not done during the course

Distilling Essences

6 Jul 20
Starting the journey towards a wider audience.

---

Principal Works

The final show features a trilogy of works reifying notions of the animal self, belief, and ancestry. They are also part of ongoing research into the recipient-artwork relationship in the light of subject-object theory and living-presence response and how the passivity of still sculpture can be altered using sound. In the final development of work, the pandemic has fostered new ideas in a dual approach in a dance between the real, the virtual, and in between.

Show Installation Guide

30 Jun 20

A plan for the hypothetical physical show. See also Residency 2020: Trying Out Drawing on New Laptop as a visual musing or sketch on the show planning.

---

Other Works

Sample images of some of the single or series of work made during the MA leading to the resolved body of work and which may play a part in future projects.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Exploring in the context of ideas, influences, inspirations and reflection.

Unit 1 post

Iterations of Something Different?

13 Sep 19
Relevance of the current motif.

Unit 2 posts

Flowers for Algernon

15 Nov 19
The crystallisation of a principal idea in the development of Enshrinement (formally entitled Spes Contra Spem) and conceptual challenges when dealing with sculpture and sound.

Constructing Irretrievable Narratives to Living Presence Response

20 Nov 19
Context in the light of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. An analysis of the relationship between myself, the work and the receiver.

Living  Presence Response

23 Nov 19
The role as an implementer of ideas and facilitator of behaviours, shaping circumstances and not just unilaterally responding to them.

Living Presence Response: A Description of the Ineffable?

24 Nov 19
Tracing Gell’s living presence response to its origins to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics. The system of social agency and considering the notion of the sublime, the ineffable, and the impossibility to see the world as it really is. The meaningful integration of performance, the sacred and secular. Having in mind, Smriti Mehra’s video about a Ganesh festival. The festival is an iteration of an idea for a video involving clay I have had for around two years – and may work towards for the project.

Skype chat 4.6: Economics of Being an Artist

26 Nov 19
The artist’s relationship to income and various proposed economic models intended to free citizens’ time from labour to enable them to engage in more self-actualising forms of work. A reflection on some financial possibilities for after the MA.

Assessing Nuances and Focus

30 Nov 19
Directions indicated by Unit 1 feedback. The part played by sound and the possibility of using wrapping as a part of the installation.

Randomness and Contingency

5 Dec 19
Incorporating stochastic elements in Enshrinement, merging the sacred and the secular using texts from The Bible and the Origin of Species.

A Time for Reflection

11 Dec 19
Cyclical ideas and how the current work involves a central element of the original project proposal and research statement, both of which changed radically; practical solutions for display; the direction of travel towards the final show.

Between Theory and Practice

16 Dec 19
Primarily a reflection on the imaginative process of visualisation in making.

Angles, Atoms and Rhythm: A Reference

18 Dec 20
An observation on form from the world of chemistry.

Subject-Object Relationship

19 Dec 19
Strategies: conveying affective meaning and fostering engagement by breaking the passive resistance.

Mnemosyne

22 Dec 19
Artworks as iconologies delineating and opening to the imagination spaces in a fragmentary narrative and open them to the imagination.

Conversation, Intersubjectivity and the Suspension of Reality

30 Dec 19
The qualified use of the word conversation and the asymmetric dynamics between subject and object and the consent to suspend scepticism whereby an artwork is conferred its full agency.

Passive Resistance

31 Dec 19
A reflection on how the physical stillness of still sculpture has its own agency and how sound can enhance this and disrupt the element of same quality of stillness.

Metamerism: Why Make It So Difficult

5 Jan 20
Coiling creates a trace of segmented development reflecting the repeating structures encountered in animal growth and development.

Alembic

5 Jan 20
Words, their meanings and the current repeating motif.

Segmentation and Culture

22 Jan 20
Reflecting on the working process, keeping the traces segmentation during the building of the work, and the challenges of the material; archaeological artefacts and inspiration; layering meaning with titles – an open invitation.

The Future and the Past in One Place

18 Jun 20
A symbolic means of managing pauses, change, and restarts in my work.

Thought for Implementation

27 Jan 20

Reflections on the negative space contained within the sculpture.

Orpheus and Eurydice

10 Feb 20
The myth as a metaphor for the artist’s process.

Kant on the Infinite – Critique of Pure Reason

15 Feb 20
A redacted and another full version of Kant’s famous musing on the nature of existence.

Tabula Rasa – Again

9 Mar 20
A return to the notion of tabula rasa as cleared surfaces to enable the continuation of work on Logos.

“Modernism, Freedom, Sculpture: On“

11 Apr 20
A reading of William Tucker’s description of sculpture: the need for it to be mythical, and how this might be done in online presentations.

Alternative Exhibition Spaces and a Gecko

16 Apr 20
Moving exhibiting online can give rise to new tactics and strategies.

Process and Ritual

19 Apr 20
The online concept moves thinking about ritual embodied in work from externally derived sources to the making process itself.

It is All a Matter of Scale: the Miniature Museum and the Monumental

21 Apr 20
Reflection on work conceived on a large scale translated and made on a small scale.

The Raum Gallery: Between Space

24 Jun 20
Popup show curated by Don TakGuy. Contextualising documentary imagery.

Creativity and the Life Cycle of Artists

26 Jun 20
Analysis of Ginsburgh and Weyers paper that despite its methodological flaws throws light on the nature of my practice.

Paul Caldwell on Writing for Artists

1 Jul 20
An invaluable resource

Experimental Form

3 Jul 20
Rethinking a work preceding Enshrinement in a new light: bringing things together.

Ambivalence

4 Jul 20
Reflecting on a transitional piece.

---

These posts were written during the residency but posted much later on because of the blog data loss. Broadening and deepening subject knowledge, personal and professional development, communication and presentation, research, experimentation, collaboration, analyse, reflection and learn from others in a supportive community.

Residency 2020: Cyanotype Workshop

7 Jun 20
A new technique that I intend to use in the future.

Residency 2020: Group Tutorial with Kaori Homma

7 Jun 20
Fourth paragraph onwards of particular interest. The hacking of the blog required an alternate delivery of my practice which led to the identification of challenges in working with words and their incorporation into my practice.

Residency 2020: Multichannel Workshop

7 Jun 20
Background and practice

Residency 2020: Well Being, Intellectual Property and Zines

8 Jun 20
On awareness of intellectual property issues put into practice with a subsequent workshop. A medium I would like to explore further in the future.

Residency 2020: V&A Digital Art Collection

8 Jun 20
A musing on the aesthetics of machine-assisted and generated art.

Residency: Pure Data Workshop

8 Jun 20
An overview of the workshop that demystifies Pure Data.

Residency 2020: Group Tutorials

8 Jun 20
Collaborative session designed to solicit solutions in a supportive community.

Residency 2020: Gallery Visits

9 Jun 20
A photographic essay of the galleries visited: an aid to memory in contextualising my work in the commercial sector.

Residency 2020: Letterpress Workshop

10 Jun 20
Individual and collaborative session on metal type printing.

Residency 2020: British Library, Qatar Foundation Project

10 Jun 20
Guided tour of print conservation and digitisation at the V&A

Residency 2020: Trying Out Drawing on New Laptop

11 Jun 20
Subjective differences between digital stylus and mouse while planning the physical show.

---

Research Discussion

The research discussion extended work done for the research statement. Preparing for the discussion was extremely useful in bringing into the open a theoretical area of my practice that had hitherto remained somewhat obscured by aesthetic considerations. This has enabled me to contextualise and develop an expandable conceptual framework for future research.

26 Jan 20
Email inviting fellow students to write about their relationships with their work in preparation for the research discussion as part of planning in terms of subject-object considerations and the living-presence response. Also reflecting on the benefit of preparing for the discussion.

Research Discussion: Introductory Video

4 Feb 20
Outlining my thinking prior to the research discussion.

Research Discussion Videos

A script for the fourth video is completed and the film will be published in the near future.

---

Posts dealing with blog matters and its role during Unit 2

A Place for Tags and Categories

09 Nov 19
This post was written in response to the blog curation process. This clarity of how to use effectively the tools on the blog is helping me to plan and organise my project and simplify the development of methodology in what is a complex matter.

Website Disaster Averted

6 Mar 20
A description of the loss of data on the blog and how it would be restored. The situation turned out more complex as will be explained in a later post.

Blog Restoration Complete!

20 Apr 20
A celebration of the completion of the blog restoration and how this work has given me a better overview.

Blog Journal Summary

17 Jun 20
On the role the blog has played in developing my practice.

---

A collection of writings that draw from themes explored in the project proposal. Written as creative works in themselves, they form a further layer of meaning without becoming overt explications.

The Gut

5 Jan 20
Metaphorical prose that speaks of the centrality of the alimentary canal in evolution and how, what is taken for granted as a primary human attribute, spirituality, emerges and is dependent on the physical being: how the notion of the divine coexists with the animal as part of a symbiotic and cooperative system.

Logos – Title

26 Mar 20
A consideration of the title Logos, a verse of the same name, and its physical incorporation into the sculpture in the form of a repeating inscription as hinted in Words Without Title.

Prose Poems

26 Jun 20
A compilation of creative writing relevant to and written during the project from Units 1 and 2.

---

Working with the physical element of text.

Flesh Made Stone

9 Mar 20
Reflections on the experimental inscribing of porcelain; the inclusion of words on sculpture.

Words Without Title

10 Mar 20
Continued experimenting with surface text – thoughts and inspirations

The Erosion of Words Like Memory Raises Curiosity Over Meaning

27 Mar 20
The beginning of incising words on Logos. Reflecting on balancing the engagement that might come from the words with the overall form, meaning and effect.

Two Things About Writing on the Sculpture

31 Mar 20
Considering the language and layout of the inscribed text in the sculpture (Logos) and their possible consequences for the behaviour of the recipient.

A New Font

1 Apr 20
The development of a font from the process of inscribing on characters on the porcelain that resembles historical antecedents and their origins.

New Font Creation

10 Apr 20
The creation of a font based on the mark-making of letters on porcelain.

Lettering Logos

3 Apr 20
Video and documenting the inscription process on one of the porcelain parts of Logos.

---

Cat – Essay

30 Apr 20
Commissioned essay published as Cats (and Art) for the exhibition Stuckat(s)home https://stuckats.wordpress.com/cats-and-art/

---

Recording and engineering of soundtracks.

Unit 1 posts

Idea for Sonic Circumvention

5 Jul 19
Logos‘ sound arrangement has its origin in a curatorial consideration.

Unit 2 posts

Sound from Far and Within

12 Feb 20
Questions arising out of experimental sound recordings from within sculptural spaces and their acoustic behaviour.

Low-Frequency Track for Logos

27 Jun 20
Description of the process to compose the environmental sound element for Logos.

Experimenting with Logos’ Internal Voice

28 Jun 20
Description of the process to compose Logos’ internal sound element.

---

Implementation of soundtracks into the installation

Unit 1 posts

Details Regarding Sonic Circumvention

5 Jul 19
Plan of implementation for Logos’ reactive ambient sound

PD Pi Uno and Sharp

28 Jul 19
Procuring equipment for use in Enshrinement and Logos

First Circuit

3 Aug 19
Getting to grips with coding and circuitry to use with proximity sensors.

Unit 2 posts

Subwoofers: To Port or To Seal

19 Jan 20
Technical considerations in the putting together speakers for the audio for Logos: comparing speaker type and how to house them.

Creating a Binaural Headset

16 Apr 20
Theory and making of a binaural recording system and procurement of equipment. Used in one element of the symposium video, this will be used in future audio projects.

Consideration of Sound Management

8 Jun 20
Planning the sound delivery in Logos

Performance

25 Jun 20
Reflection on the experimental outcome of working with sound and sculpture in relation to my practice.

---

Changes and adaptions to restrictions imposed during the coronavirus lockdown, charting challenges and opportunities arising and mitigating the effects on the project proposal and planned delivery of the final show.

Clearing the Decks and Timetabling

8 Mar 20
Organising timetables for the completion of the project proposal and Unit 2 prior to the lockdown. Although changed in view of the pandemic the list helped identify priorities and timings.

Binary Vision

20 Mar 20

First thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the project and the exhibition at Camberwell.

Adapting and Videoing

28 Mar 20
Adapting to the challenges set by the coronavirus and the opportunities of extending my practice in different directions, enriching the explication of the work and process.

An Icon of Change: The Kiln

2 Apr 20

Reflection on the kiln as a symbol of the effect of COVID-19 on my work and how I plan to meet some of the challenges arising.

Text(ure) – Millet, Allegory and Readings

4 Apr 20
Reflection on the allegorical nature of my work and the challenge of translating a physical, sensual experience (show) into an online presence and the importance of sound in doing so.

A Moment of Change

8 Apr 20
On the challenge of translating content from a physical show to one online.

The Kiln, the Kiln, Oh the Kiln

31 May 20
The connection of the new kiln and how this has called into question what has happened so far regarding the changes in direction due to the virus lockdown: the necessity to show a plan for the hypothetical show at Camberwell.

Mitigating the Impact of the Coronavirus on the Delivery of the Project Proposal

10 Jun 20
The opportunities that have arisen from the lockdown situation and how things will move into the future.

---

Tutorial 7: 18 March 2020, Jonathan Kearney

17 May 20
A discussion on the challenges of the coronavirus; dealing with the blog data loss; the final show; my ongoing work, experimental and conceptual approaches; education and synthetic thinking.

Tutorial 8: 13 May 2020. Jonathan Kearney

29 May 20
An overview of the course and appraisal of how I have done, in particular with respect to the blog journal and the symposium.

Tutorial 8.2: 19 June 2020. Jonathan Kearney

20 Jun 20
Final tutorial: prioritisation of work towards assessment; miniatures as alternatives, blog curation.

---

Preparations for the online show in collaboration with Aristotle Roufanis

Online Show Update

2 Jul
Final resolution of content for the Cables Javascript presentation

Online Show and Spaces

15 Apr 20
Response to a skype meeting to discuss the online show space. The challenges of visualising with no experience.

Online Show Spaces 2

17 Apr 20
Initial concept for online exhibition space

Online Show Spaces 3

18 Apr 20
A reconceptualisation of the virtual exhibition space based on previous analyses. The viewer’s relationship with the work becomes dynamic and not only spatial.

Virtual Space Work Flow

28 Apr 20
Outline decision making for the virtual exhibition space.

Online Show: Skype Chat with Aristotle

5 Jun 20
An outline of Skype conversation with Aristotle regarding the development of the online show: camera movements and polygon layouts.

---

From sculpture supports to making the installation more accessible.

Gesture, Imprint, Matrix

15 Jan 20
Using the hand as a matrix to create handling pieces bringing the visitor into a closer engagement with the human element of the work. Planned participation for visitors to make their own.

Display: Stands and Supports

4 Mar 20
A solution for supporting Logos that deals with the storage, logistic, installation and aesthetic challenges.

Tracking Dolly Test

15 Apr 20
Testing some possibilities when filming work for online with newly procured track.

Green Screen Test

17 Apr 20
Trial photograph to test green screen techniques.

Tube Clamp Suppliers

19 Apr 20
Suppliers of tube clamps and tubing for scaffolding support

Handling Pieces: The Tactile and the Virtual

21 Apr 20

Touch and the practicalities of showing vulnerable work: a solution that helps contextualise and recontextualise work in a physical and virtual environments.

Helmet of the Sun God

21 Jan 20
Musings on a welding helmet acquired for the construction of the vitrine and support structure for Enshrined and Logos. Although it will be useful for other work, it is no longer needed for the project as I since have opted to use a scaffolding system (see Display: Stands and Supports).

Skype Chat 4.8: Unit 2

16 Dec 19

An explication of Unit 2 learning outcomes and assessed components.