Although it was a short week with not as much done as I’d have liked, this week was an excellent jumping-off point for the work needed for the following semester.
The first major thing that happened was getting a settled spot sewing, and the completion of my mind map and artist PowerPoint. While I didn’t really care about the required class assignments Prof. Norry had us doing at first, I now must admit she knows what she’s doing. For everyone’s first major exhibition and bringing a cohesive idea across in your artwork, there is not enough explanation, detail, and prep you can give yourself to support your artwork to be the best it can be. I think I finally have my working title for my work this semester.
Patior is a Latin word meaning “to suffer/ to endure”. The word is fitting because all my work will be made in 2 parts: one “to suffer” and one “to endure”. My time in college has felt like an alternation between these two states, and I want to explore the feelings of both to (hopefully) analyze the person I was starting college compared to who I am now.
So much internal turmoil caused me to suffer but enduring that suffering is what now gives me the confidence to truly be bold and experimental in my work. I wrestled with a constant spirit of inadequacy in my work, never being content with the work I produced. I viewed it as too immature, not polished enough, not professional enough, not showing enough mastery of skill and medium, too simple, too stupid, and whatever excuse, I could give myself to put down my work. At first, this was something that pushed me at work to try harder and take it to the next level, but the mindset was so ingrained that any progress I was making was futile. I gave up working for a period of a year and a half, telling myself that the ideas weren’t worthwhile for anyone. This time off, focusing on something other than sewing, gave me the context I desperately needed.
This shit is not that deep, and my opinion of my work was flat-out wrong. The work that I refused to see any merit in was perfect because it was work only, I could be making. I wanted my work to break the bounds of sewing, to be world renowned gallery art that evoked emotions like I felt looking at the masters of art. But this focus on perfection had me miss what I was doing in my own work for so long. No, I am not a skilled painter or technical graphical artist who can bring any idea to life with the stroke of a brush or pen. The limitation that I kept wanting to surpass was the thing that gave me my own voice creatively. Having to figure out how to present my ideas in my mediums with my own ideas, the only way I was able to is what empowered my work.
Every compliment I ever received on my work in college was met by my flat-out rejection. I'd point out the flaws, my sewing hiccups, all the places where, in my mind, I failed as an artist in my interpretation. I forced my opinion of failure and futility onto the viewer. But despite this, people would just tell me that they liked the work for what it was. They found the composition cool, the fabric choice was nice, they appreciated the stitching, etc. And that’s one of the big pieces of art that I just did not fundamentally grasp. It does not matter what your intention is in making a work. You can place all the meaning and symbolism, all the time and effort, everything you have into a work, but all the viewer sees is the final project, absent of all the context that artists wades in to get to a finished piece. What you are trying to say comes second to what the viewer sees in your work for themselves. And that was the key I didn’t get. I had too much of myself in my work, so I couldn’t step back far enough to look at my work objectively. I couldn’t see what other people did, and it weighed down my work because of it.
This time spent suffering is still very important because it gave me a lot of time to refine my work. Now this senior exit will allow me to express and showcase everything I’ve endured to be the artist that I am now.
I'll talk more about it either in another blog post a little later or at the end of the year (end of the year, so I can show a definite timeline of everything), but I have an entire visual language that I have not properly used these last 4 years of college. I am sitting on a trove of fabric, stencils, written concepts and ideas, and digital graphic packs that I have held back due to a perceived lack of quality. It is time to open the floodgates. I will be using this blog to not only talk about the work for my senior exit, but as a personal log for the reexamination of past work through the glasses I have now.
I'm still working on finishing all my required samples for class (doing 10 small compositions that each focus Ona different set of 3 stitches to get some minor working experience with every stitch available on a Singer 4452 heavy-duty machine), but I created my first abstract composition this past week as well. I think it still needs some work, namely more stitching and some dye, but it’ll be good practice trying out new compositions and techniques.
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