One of my favourite parts of Allison's lectures is the way she introduces each artist and explains their backgrounds and aims in the industry. It's a really nice way of adding a whole lot of value to an artist's work. It's such an important thing when you're studying individuals, as it allows the viewer a glimpse into the context and reasoning behind pieces that might otherwise be ignored.
It's really made me think about the 'why' in all of my pieces. Where all the ideas come from, why I did things the way I did, what's to blame. It's a whole lot of really useful stuff to think about because it adds a great deal more to the projects. It's that neat connection between research and the final piece that's often overlooked.
Recently this has proved to be a huge dividing point between me and the values of this course. Recently it has begun to feel like context has been dragged apart from the work it's connected to. Whilst the contextual portfolio is still thankfully a thing, even that has begun to be dismantled from its original purpose. The first time I really noticed this was the visual appendix. Each design I made for that project was heavily based around research into other superheroes and real world outfits and cultures. I wanted each costume to be well reasoned and to have a function in the list rather than just a collection of useless lines and meaningless icons. The word give context to the art and add so much more value to it. Needless to say I was dissapointed when I discovered the visual appendix was meant to be completely contextless. All of that reasoning, all of that background, all that inspiration. All washed away. Whilst I understand the vague reasoning here, and that the pictures are supposed to come first, the harsh word limit has only hurt peoples projects. Students now have to rely on tutors understanding their work right off the bat. As Allison has instilled on us from the start of the year, that's not how things work. That's not how art is effective.
As I understand things so far, the contextual portfolio still performs in its original function as a blog the tutors will look through, and I'm happy about that. But if that is no longer the case then something is deeply wrong at the core of this course. The presentation idea is a decent way of showcasing the core of what's going on but unless the blog is also looked at the entire notion of the contextual portfolio falls flat on its face. At this point the contextual portfolio has to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the studio work as well as its own regular function. If it's not read then it feels like a really important part of the creative process is being abandoned
To wrap this up, I feel like context is becoming increasingly
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