Finding My Personal Identity

19th January 2010

The beginning of the end of the project

This project has to be the longest and most difficult project I’ve ever had to do. It’s challenged me many times and has changed my view on certain things. It has made me find out wonderful things I never knew before and has made me want to tear my hair out because I’d lost my way. At some points I wasn’t sure whether to love it or hate it; but the past few days have finally allowed me to figure out what the whole project is really about.

I began the project by collecting feathers as I have a strange fascination with flight; it was a collections project and feathers (in my opinion) were the closest thing to flight I could collect. So I spent my summer just picking up feathers where ever I could and I researched into bird anatomy just to give me an idea of how birds and feathers worked. Once the summer break was over and we returned to Uni, we were given the second part to the brief, which was to use the ‘objects’ or ‘collections’ we’d all collected and turn them into a final piece of some sort. It sounded easy to begin with; I’d already got preconceived ideas or themes that I really wanted to and thought this was the opportunity to do them. It wasn’t. I found whenever I had a talk with tutors or friends different ideas would surface and different opinions meant I was faced with lots of choices. I really wanted to do an ‘Icarus’ themed final piece but I don’t think that even had a chance to be heard. I thought up loads of different ideas and played around with a few ideas, but nothing seemed to really engage me.

It was around here that I was presented with the live ‘potato’ brief from an outside company. This project took over from all other projects for the 3 or so weeks that I had it; but it was a truly valuable project that I am pleased to have undertaken and I have learnt so much from those 3 weeks. But once that project was completed it was time to come back to Personal Identity. I found the more I thought about it and did this work, the more I began to dislike it all and lost the will to do the project. When given the task to write my own brief I found that I couldn’t figure out what to do. When I finally did produce a few briefs, they were discarded quickly by not only me but a few others. That was the final straw for me and I decided that I disliked the project and I really didn’t want to do it. It was doing nothing but make me unhappy with my work and it felt like a chore; something that no project should do.

During the Christmas break I did nothing but procrastinate over the project; something that I’m unfortunately good at. The notes from a tutorial done just before the break were a good help: some of it wasn’t to my liking but I didn’t realise then that it actually makes a lot of sense. The most productive thing I did over the break was go to a local lake and I took lots of photos of birds in their natural habitat, then I drew a few images from them.

It wasn’t until I came back to study after Christmas and had my first tutorial that a big chunk of jigsaw pieces that were scattered came together. I knew it was the start of something as I left the tutorial smiling, rather than sour-faced. I realised that I’d cornered myself straight away when I chose feathers to collect; there is only so much I can do with feathers. I only looked at the collections brief when doing the project; I forgot about the ‘personal identity’ side of the module. Feathers wouldn’t allow me to find myself a way of working and find my favourite methods. I should have picked something that I do anyway, that I enjoy, that I could explore even more: Which is where I am now.

I figured out yesterday that it’s not about the deadline of the project; it’s about finding our own way of working. Of course, the deadline to the module matters, it closes the project and I get marked on what I’ve achieved in the time period, but it doesn’t mean I stop the process forever. It’s probably one of the most important projects/process for me as an Illustrator. It’s a journey into me and the things I like, and taking that information and finding similar things/people that can help me find new ways of working and things that will inspire.

I think the best way to describe what I did was that ‘I went and looked for something that was far away when all along it was right in front of me’. I believe everything I did over the time I had this project, even when I was doing nothing for the project, was completely necessary for me to be able to get to where I am now. It’s taken a very long time for me to be able to see things much more clearly, and I’m only disappointed that it didn’t come sooner so that I could have so much more work to hand in. But I can’t change that so will have to make do with the work I do have now; work that I have produced in the past 2 weeks that I have enjoyed researching/drawing/making: work that didn’t feel like a chore.