Notes on my creative practice: seeing & recording
As August is a good time for reflecting on your creative practice, when you have the time and energy to stop for a bit and examine how things are going, I thought I’d continue looking at my own creative practice here on the blog. I regularly write about what I’m up to, creatively, I find it helps me when I get stuck or it allows me to consider things that usually happen spontaneously that I don’t necessarily pay much attention to. I genuinely believe it benefits makers to really consider why they make things, as well as how. I recommend that people try to write about what they are doing with their making, regularly, unguardedly, as a way to understand what is happening. These thoughts are not necessarily meant to be essays in the formal, academic sense, but they are essays in the etymological sense – they are trials and testings, an attempt at figuring things out.
Notes on my creative practice: photography as drawing
Am I a photographer? she asks. Quite a reasonable question to ask someone who is attending a photography even run by photographers for photographers. I don’t hesitate in saying ‘no, I’m a maker and a writer’. After all, that is what I am officially trained in, I have a degree in making stuff and an-almost-lifetime in writing stuff down. And yet, photography is the medium I find myself turning to more often than not. Through the camera is how I have started to see the world. It is how I remember the places I have been, it is how I catalogue the experiences and the objects. It is my cypher for actual memories, or for drawing, or some other method of remembering that people use. I find the image I took becomes the shorthand, the shortcut in my mind of where I was, when. The image becomes everything.