1-2-1 Reflections.
I had my 1-2-1 tutorial with Jonathan on the 27th of April, following my trip to Kingussie and ahead of the Unit 3 video and curated blog deadlines. It was a really helpful catch up and we covered a lot of ground. Having just come back from Kingussie, we started by talking through the video footage and my plans for the 5-minute video. The main challenge I had encountered during filming was capturing the audio of the landscapes. When listening back to the footage, what came through most prominently was either the wind or the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel paths. Jonathan suggested looking into getting a dead cat to help pick up cleaner audio when filming outdoors, and also recommended the Motiv audio app for sound recording on future trips. Both feel like really practical and useful suggestions, especially as capturing the sounds of the landscape is becoming an increasingly important part of how I want to document and share these places.
We also touched on my experience of reading Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, which I had just finished before the tutorial. I really enjoyed the book and found it opened up a lot of new ways of thinking about landscape, ecology and more-than-human relations. Jonathan suggested looking into Mycoaesthetics as a natural next step for exploring that line of enquiry further, which feels like a really exciting direction to take things.
Jonathan also introduced me to Nora Bateson as an artist and researcher that it would be worth looking into, particularly her concept of warm data and her book Combining. Jonathan felt there was a real overlap between Bateson's thinking about interconnectedness and the relational qualities in my own work, which I found really interesting. I'm looking forward to reading Combining and exploring how her ideas might connect with and inform my own practice and how I talk about it.
As we're coming towards the end of the course, we also spent some time talking about my plans for the end of year show. At the time of the tutorial my main plan was to bring a selection of works inspired by the Highland landscapes, ideally painted at A1 size, with Gynack and Creag Bheag as backup options if needed. We also talked about the photographs I took of the paintings in place in Kingussie, and Jonathan felt it would be really interesting to have these printed and shown alongside the finished paintings. I love this idea as it would give another dimension and layer to the work and add something to the viewer's understanding of the relationship between the paintings and the places that inspired them.
We also touched briefly on the PhD process and how that is going. I mentioned that I had come across Emily Beaney, an artist at ECA who is working in a similar area to me, and that I am planning to reach out to her ahead of my application to chat about her experience of studying at ECA and her practice more generally. I am also working on a draft PhD proposal as part of my Unit 3 work, which feels like a really exciting thing to be doing at this stage. Jonathan noted how urgent and timely the themes I want to pursue feel right now, which was really encouraging to hear and has reinforced my sense that this is the right time to be moving in this direction.
