Christine Lowthian
An interesting self-editing challenge. ‘5 minute PPt presentation, ‘2 images’ , past work & introduce yourself.’ Approached thus:
SLIDE ONE: “Shinrin” slide-show and explanation of the project.
SLIDE TWO: A little autobiographical introduction by way of a sample bookshelf describing education, career and other interests.
A first impression: Environment – there are beautiful trees on the University campus at Brampton Road.
When you look more closely, you see that they are all tagged with arboreal curation numbers, suggesting something special about them beyond their simple beauty. I wonder what the reason is that they are tagged……. Thus, life here begins with beauty wrapped in a little mystery and on a familiar theme – as if ‘nothing has changed’. False security I imagine, ahead of much change to come.
A first impression: Assignment – Prepare a short talk – 5 mins long and illustrated by 2 digital images using PowerPoint (recent work/Information about yourself) to present on Thursday 19th Sept. There’s an exercise in self-editing!
Exciting times. What a relief it is to have got past all the account registration and logging-in tedium associated with setting up an academic account -phew! The rewards are good though; like being able (finally) to access the library online and reveal the delights of ‘reading lists’ for the forthcoming modules. Yes, this is exciting. It is also tinged with a bit of frustration; finding that I can only read one thing at a time. I am hungry and want to devour everything all at once. It is tinged with a bit of frustration also, because I want to get ‘making’. This last, is interrupted by the ‘studio project’ which I am trying to discipline myself to get finished before I start to ‘spewdio’ again.
Between the studio (actually, I much prefer ‘art-room’) project and directed reading, I have been enjoying dipping into some of the Art magazine article notifications that shine out from among all the horrible spam in my email box. A delight to find this….
… and indulge in a little nostalgia about teaching art and in particular, the enthusiastic response pupils had to the topic we did about Razzle and Op Art -thoughts about which, now accrue around issues of perception/philosophy etc arising from the MA reading…..