Summative evaluation/project report

Overall I have really enjoyed this module, and have seen an arc of personal growth in my practise.
I have worked on a variety of briefs, including commissions, competitions and self-directed projects. This variety has been valuable as I have had to learn how to efficiently manage my own time and spread my efforts between briefs with deadlines and more sprawling, open-ended projects.
I have also worked across a range of media this year, which has kept my practise feeling fresh and interesting to me and stopped my ideas turning stale. This varied way of working is something I know I will carry with me when I leave university and continue to establish my practice.

I think starting a textile-art practise with my weavings has been very significant for me and has had an over-arching positive influence on my work. My practise is organically evolving to become more shape and pattern based, I have become more confident in my use of colour and I am identifying a real rhythmic joy in working, whether weaving, painting, creating hand-rendered lettering, or mono printing. I have definitely identified myself as a tactile 'maker' this year, and have found new excitement in processes of painting and mono printing. This was partly helped along by COP3, in which I investigated the influence of tactile texture in work.

Having had a year out last year and coming back after such a long break, I find it very interesting to compare the "then" and "now" of my work. Perhaps it is just the natural way of something changing and evolving as I grow older and more established within myself, but I can now identify a real universal truth or principle that runs through all my work now. Although I have many different ways in which I like to produce work,  I think there is some deeper message or philosophy to my work now that makes it mine - something slightly deeper than just a visual aesthetic. This is a really great feeling and I think gives me a strong base to build up. I know the kind of messages and ideas that I want to put out into the world.

A real inner piece has come to me this year by ceasing to try and define myself as a illustrator. This is a label that I've struggled with in the past, often feeling that it never quite fit. This year I have come to think of myself as simply an image-maker or an artist, and I feel more creative than ever for it. Although illustration and the principles of it still have an influence over my practise and my personal aesthetic tastes, my concerns about not being a certain 'type' of illustrator have gone. Instead, I know think I made work that is driven forward simply by the patterns and truths that I think I see in the world around me.

A commissioned project that I really enjoyed this year was one that I undertook for the Leeds Bread Co-operative. I've been unsure in the past about how my personal principles and politics could work in 'the industry'; I have no problem identifying myself as anti-capitalist, and have more interest in working for small community projects rather than big companies. However doing a design job for a local workers co-operative (flat rate of pay/elf-organised/no top-down management) has shown me that actually getting paid for your work and working for decent people are not mutually exclusive. It also gave me the chance to work closely with Footprint Worker's Co-op.

I have no real anxieties or expectations about the future finishing this degree course. I've really enjoyed most of it, but also still think of myself as only being at the very beginning of my artistic practise. It's been good, but the best is yet to come.