Group Critique

I always find group critiques one of the most rewarding ways to step back and analyse yours and your peers work. It is also so helpful to receive very direct feedback which you may not receive another way. This helps form direction, try and work through doubts about your work and work out what is working well within your practice so your work can move forward.

An interesting topic that was raised in my group crit was my position as an artist/painter. Feedback has suggested that my work is misleading as it is made with such energy and assertion, yet underlying these very bold statement is the feeling of fatigue and doubt. I personally don't feel this is a bad position for me or my work to be in at this present time. This is because the direction and intentions are still becoming clear to me. Another point was not just my position but painters in general. This was because a painters position in contemporary art is becoming more and more ambiguous. This is also another element that injects a sense of doubt into my work.

There were some points raised that I didn't necessarily agree with but I still took on board and experimented with prior to the group crit. One of these points was to vary the thickness of tape used. I felt quite closed minded when first hearing the suggestion because the work I was creating was so unbalanced in so many ways I felt a consistency that ran through the piece helped ground the work and give it more substance. After trying to vary the thickness, it did make the piece even more nonsensical, however in some cases I had already been pushing the boundaries on how uneasy you can make a piece before it collapses and I felt not keeping the thickness consistence was one step too far.

Another point was to paint the work using something other than a sponge. I could understand that this was an obvious point to make as I had been using a sponge to paint more of the work I've made on the core project. But I chose not to try this idea out because I feel the mark making and paint application I had achieved with a sponge could be mistaken for a number of different painting tools. For example, brushes, fingers etc.

The group crit since has really benefited my work, perhaps not in the way I'm producing it but I am now holding much more importance over the theological ideas and motivations that I've used to make my work.