Critiques year three

Finally getting back to teaching today. I’ve been doing nothing but day after day of interviews. We had over 500 applicants and we see everyone. This meant looking through portfolios and giving each person approx. 15 minutes to convince us that they should be a degree student. In order to cut the time down, we choose one piece of work from the portfolio and take it to the interview room, this is what people have to then talk about, whether they like the work or not, the days of students going through the portfolio from front to back are now long gone. Sometimes potential students find the process one of opening up and being creative, at others I get the feeling they find it autocratic and impersonal.

As soon as interviews finished it was assessment time again and we were marking collaborative work done by the first year. This week though I’m doing critiques with year three. This group of students is one I haven’t worked with since I did a drawing week with them in the second year, so it’s interesting for me to get a feel of where they are. The morning session picked up some fundamental problems, the chief of which was pragmatic testing. I was worried that students were letting ideas drag on. The reality of professional practice is that you have to keep making things that can be exhibited. This means being pragmatic about what you hold on to and being prepared to let go. I think this group of students are over-working and over-thinking their production. They are not testing out the reality of how to get the idea out there and it feels as if everything is too comfortable. I realise they have just been writing their dissertations but again the reality is all of us have to manage multi-tasking if we are to get anything done. I’m also aware of students working out of other institutions and I would expect to see far more resolved pieces by now. Perhaps the critiques have not been aggressive enough or previous successes have been replayed too many times, whatever it is a wake-up call is needed. Above all the key issue is work. Work creates more work and work is often all there is. Then, when you have  a pile of stuff you can go in with that critical eye and pick stuff out, but fiddling about gets you nowhere, as I can clearly remember when I think back to some students I was at college with, including at times myself.

Thinking of long gone days, this is another of those foundation ‘Morning Drawing’ exercises.

‘Looking down at the body and drawing what you can see’.

Students are asked to draw landscapes of the body. Standing at an easel, they are to simply look down at themselves and draw what they see. Gradually the drawings would move from having to deal with extremely foreshortened perspective, to issues such as in and out of focus. In particular drawings would have to deal with disappearing noses, shapes that were shadows of their former selves, coming into and out of focus. How the eye works its way across surfaces previously understood from views in the mirror, now having to be re-invented as landscapes of personal ownership. The point about these drawings being of course that the familiar can become strange again, simply by taking a new perspective on it.

The students I spoke to this morning need to be able to grasp this point. They all had interesting subjects, but they needed to refresh their ideas by taking on new and different perspectives. Always of course easier said than done.