I am happy and satisfied with my own performance and process this semester. I was able to give a lot more of myself, and work a lot more focussed and engaged within my practice. Being in the studio typically 5-6 days a week really helped with this. I made a big effort to make the studio my workspace, to really separate myself from my practice, and give myself time away from it too. I noticed in previous semesters that I benefit a lot from organising my work into different workflows, and giving myself the space and time to get into these workflows. When really needing to think, create or reflect, I need to give myself that room and distance myself from distractions and a constant flow of stimuli. Being around people and actively talking about my work and art and perspectives in general also greatly helped my practice this year. I realised how important constant dialogue and conversation is to my work, and how to foster that within my work.

At the start of this semester, I took some time to reflect on these past three years and my practice as an artist. I wanted to identify what I enjoy working on, what motivates me, and how to foster that and further develop my practice as an artist. I set a few goals for myself. Not as a specific or linear management of what I wanted to achieve, but rather as areas of focus, that I would keep looking back to, and trying to consciously work towards. One of these was to allow myself to focus just on art —what that meant for me, how I saw that evolving, how that was a productive and stimulating thing for my practice and life. Another was to identify earlier, when I get stuck within the process of ideating or ‘thinking things through’. I very easily let myself just think about things for extended periods of time, without actually experimenting, investigating or experiencing the things I am thinking about. The last ‘main’ focus area, was for me to experiment more —to actually asses my comfort zone, and seek ways to push the boundaries of it, to try things I had never done without preconceived notions of how I would need to succeed in them, but rather to just try and see how I can give it shape.

Besides this, one of my goals for this semester was to find a functional format for my process (and specifically the process book) into my practice. I enjoy doing process, the accumulation and documentation, it is something so central to my practice. I find it fun and beneficial to me personally, but the format of it was never too externally focussed. I felt that there were ways how I could bridge this, to make the process a tool for my practice, a way to communicate more about my work and make that an accessible thing for other people that I would collaborate or engage with. This website is the main output of that.

___reflection_semester

_______(learning reflections)

It is restructured, with different, more focussed pages that serve as a resource to my practice. It gives a better (i believe) insight into what I do as an artist, how my projects develop and evolve, and where the inspiration comes from. The final output and format is definitely something I want to further explore and develop, but I am so far pretty pleased with it.

Looking back, I am quite content with my process regarding these goals. Of course there were ups and downs (the pandemic certainly did not help with that) however I truly feel like I was able to resolve more, seek out more different experiences and grow more as an artist. I took a lot of time and space to work, to develop, to just be. The considerations and reconsiderations of my work this semester were crucial in the development of it. I really tried to carefully experiment with, see, reflect upon, and make decisions on all details of my work and the exhibition as a whole, with as much input from tutors, other artists and my classmates as possible.

As for the planning and preparations for the final exhibition, I was originally in the Space and Publication groups, but that divide merged quite a bit as the work went on. Some of the ‘big’ aspects of the exhibition planning I was involved in were the Space organisation (making the space plan, gathering information about set up and clean up, making materials lists, organising materials, setting up meetings with the class + pascal, supporting people their setups, making all the space signs with paint markers on the floors and windows), the publication (pretty much the full layout, the additional text writing, some of the gathering of content from people, the communication with the printer, the proofing of the whole document).

Additionally, I took care of the flyers (the design, contact with the risograph studio, gathering of work descriptions), became the main person to manage the budget, made a lot of spreadsheets, helped with the food for the opening (making + organising the cooking and ordering). I was also trying to support people in their communication, sat in on meetings from the marketing group / the visual design cluster, and sent emails for people.

I definitely took up quite a bit more work than was ‘expected’. Though I don’t see this as a lack of being able to delegate or communicate, but rather as a result of both a lot of motivation for and enjoyment of this work, as well as simply a lot of other people not being able to or for other reasons not doing any of the other work.

My cooperation and communication with other members of the groups I believe was pretty good. In the space group, we really made an effort to aim to have a meeting every week (the workload from the publication group was a lot more varied so the meetings were more sporadic). I usually made sure to keep minutes from meetings, so we had a record of what we agreed on or discussed. We had a lot of different group chats to streamline the work more in which I was mostly trying to stay very engaged.We really tried to keep the information and decision making as central as possible, sending updates and cc’ing a lot of people to keep them in the loop. (how much people actually read those emails / messages I don’t know). We always tried to divide the work, and make sure everybody was responsible for a portion of the work, but I definitely found myself checking in / reminding people about the work or deadlines a lot. This wasn’t at all an extra effort for me, I really enjoy having some overview and I felt as if without a little pushing, a lot of the work did not get done. (I also do have quite some previous experience within youth run group projects or events, and that ‘leadership’ role does come quite natural to me. However I do try to stay conscious of that, and try to not overpower the group or step over boundaries of other people's responsibility. I would always rather communicate and ask to see if I can help with a task, than take over and fill out work for someone without making space for them to still take that responsibility)

The cooperation and coordination within my groups was functional and fine. We tried to divide tasks and let people work on the aspects they wanted to work on, either because they enjoyed them or had specific experience in them. In the space group for example, Niklas had a lot more of a vision for how some of the building or construction plans would have to be tackled. I tried to support him in that, by helping to make lists, create more clear overviews and communicate between people. It was both of us working and taking care of the things we were good at. That overall functioned pretty well. There were definitely people who were a lot less involved, but rather than focussing a lot on their lacking engagement, we kind of just shifted the workload to the people who showed responsibility and motivation. As much as this was not ideal, it felt like the only easy way to go about things and actually get stuff done.

The main struggles or issues that arose over the planning and preparations of this exhibition had to do with responsiveness. There were several situations where people did not (after a lot of reminding) provide us with the content we needed / replied to questions in the process of decision making, missed deadlines and meetings without making any effort to do the work.

I think the simply not following through with the decisions made or work that was agreed upon to do, was the biggest struggle as far as the cooperation goes. It was hard at times to communicate with or hold people accountable for this, as they seemed to not respect other people's time and effort spent on the work for the exhibition.

Overall, I believe we were able to talk about this amongst each other and resolve it, or when it was not inhibiting the further work, simply move on from it. There were a couple of instances where these struggles were dealt with with support from teachers, but for the most part, it was solved amongst ourselves.

If i’d have to rate my own contribution to the groups of the exhibition organisation, I’d say that, in the context of working as a group in general (or in my previous experiences) i think my contribution to this group exhibition was very good. I was highly engaged and motivated —but I try to do that with every project I take on or thing I do. I put a lot of extra effort into this exhibition, at times doing a bit more than the necessary, but that is exactly what I try to do with projects I take on. I try to put my everything and full motivation into it, seeing where we can go the extra mile to make things even better. But it’s not like I did extraordinary work. I still had enough time for my own work and practice, and had time to take days off etc. Seeing this all in the context of this group, I might say my work was better than very good, but that is only because the overall level of engagement and motivation was quite low.