Evaluation

1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
The main skill I have developed is my research skills, I have learnt about many more methods such as J Stor and google scholar which give articles not just books as research sources. I think I applied these new research skills really well as I used a wide range of sources to inform my work.

2. What approaches to/methods of research have you developed and how have they informed your practical outcomes?
As mentioned before I used J stor, Google Scholar, the library and a range of websites I found myself. I found google scholar to be the most effective as it gives you more options to choose from and often gives you shorter, more concise articles to look at which personally I found easier as I find a lot of heavy reading difficult and confusing. I think this in turn has made sure my physical work in my sketchbook talks about a more narrow subject as I wasn't able to be overwhelmed with lots of less specific information.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
Although I wouldn't call it my best strength one thing thats improved for me this year has been my essay writing skills, I think that writing three small essays has made me better at getting my point across in fewer words. Also the research methods learned here are something I have already carried over into my other modules where we've had to research a topic for more physical work.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

At first I really wasn't motivated as the thought of writing essays confuses and scares me, it was also really daunting to be given a whole massive sketchbook and told we needed to fill it but given no real direction with what we needed to fill it. I filled it in the end by letting my research around Free The Nipple take me off on a tangent, but this has taught me that its a lot easier to talk a lot (physically and through my craft) about things that interest me personally.
I am also aware that I didn't really give as much thought as I should have into selecting appropriate materials and processes in my sketchbook, I tended to just use what I enjoyed using. In the future I will think more about what I am trying to convey with the work and therefore select the materials to mirror that.

5. Identify five things that you feel will benefit you during next years Context of Practice module?

1. Even more research and around a wider spectrum of things, this will lead to more well rounded findings and then I can select the thing I most enjoy talking about to discuss in an essay
   
2. More careful selection of media and being sensitive to what I am trying to convey
   
3. More time taken to write essays and then read them back to make sure I am conveying what I want to say properly
   
4. More research after the initial research and writing of my essays to support the things I am saying, I cant just be saying what I perceive to be true but rather saying things that can be supported by surveys or studies
   
5. I need to get less carried away and excited, although its good to be passionate it often makes me run away with myself and forget the point to what I was actually saying
   

Presentation Proposal For COP 2

Rationale For COP 2

My theme for COP 2 will focus on why members of society can still be so profoundly offended by nudity. Where do we draw the line between what is acceptable and what needs to be censored in terms of art that features nudity. I am interested in this because of the way my COP 1 work developed, the synthesis between my research and my sketchbook meant that whilst I was looking at things that are commonly seen as offensive and exploring those through research, one of the most common things that was coming up was nudity, such as the nudity seen in Chris Ofillis Virgin Mary. This then led to me making pieces in my sketchbook that centred around the parallels that can be drawn between nude Greek sculptures and nude people that we see on the beach or in the media. Why do we view these things so differently? Why can one been seen as vulgar and the other culturally valuable? This thought process then directly led me onto the free the nipple campaign which has been gaining massive amounts of momentum in the last few years, which I was also able to make a lot of interesting pieces around as its a very visual subject. This issue also synthesises with my own interests in feminism and gender politics as its often women that are persecuted for nudity more than men.

This is important because one thing I have learnt from rushing to pick a subject for COP 1 is that if I’m passionate about the subject it I know I can talk for longer and more enthusiastically about it.

Images For 3rd Essay

• relates to E Tappely conversation about context and looking at things with an art history brain
• free the nipple movement (feminism, interested in carrying onto next year)
• social media, easy access to support from other people who have been offended
• inequality just shown in a different way, men: acceptable, women: indecent exposure (arrested)

• relates to other image as its looking at the situation with art history brain
• relates to "cultural appropriation" book, is the Greek statue more culturally valuable than the normalisation of our own bodies
• both images deal with the hyper-sexualisation of the naked body but in particular the naked female body

FINISHING THE JOURNAL

Hallelujah god be praised today I finally finished the COP journal, and to be honest I'm so glad to have it out of the way. It was by far one of the hardest sketchbooks I've ever had to fill as it just seemed to go on for ever, but here are the last few pages from it:

Successes of the journal:

- it was quite interesting to just have to fill a journal with pieces not working towards a final piece, whilst this was hard it also meant I could go off on a bit of a tangent which I enjoyed

- it was also a place where I could investigate my use of colour, line, shape etc and see what kind of way that related to my practise. I think its interesting that the media I've used most in this is watercolour, maybe as its the fastest way to quickly record my thoughts? 

- I also think that due to the flowing nature of the concertina book the pieces have a subsequent flow to them, its relatively easy to see the development of my ideas through them

Failures of the journal:

- the amount of pages in the book was way too much and I wasn't sure I had that much to say about the theme I began with. This means as the book goes on I've kind of moulded my topic to fit something I enjoyed talking about more but hopefully was still relevant

- its possible there wasn't enough experimentation with different media in it

- I also didn't really end up picking one element to focus all my studies on 

More Journaling

Today I've been carrying on with my work in the journal, the last bit I did before this was the censored naked people paralleled with the classic nude statues. I thought a good place to carry on from this would be to paint the shapes I censored the images with as this also reminds me of all the shapes and sizes of people fitting in around each other that I talked about at the beginning of the book.

after this I simply did a magnified section of this to try and get a good background texture

Which then got me onto thinking about why we censor peoples genitals in the media and why some things are censored when others aren't such as the censoring of women's nipples but not mens on Instagram. This led to the next few paintings which mainly feature male and female nudes which were massively fun to paint free hand. I really like the style these have ended up being done in. I don't know how but suddenly this journal has turned more into a conversation about why people find nipples (particularly female) so offensive that they need to be censored, which is slightly off my original topic but I think links quite well to the discussion of offence and its different forms. This is just something that I maybe find a bit more relatable on a personal level and interesting to discuss.