within / without

I’ve been going on and on about the show and now it’s gone and passed, and I haven’t said a word about it.

As you probably already know, it was in two parts – from the 31st of March to the 6th of April and from the 7th to the 13th of April. We tried to make sure the people whose work would be up at the same time related with one another in some way and we found out that a lot of our works do that anyway. As almost everyone was exhibiting work that was part of their final year project (for the degree show in May) it was an amazing opportunity to experience the curatorial side of the whole ‘Encounter’ challenge. We found more connections between our work than we previously thought and also received amazing feedback on and after both opening nights.

My own work had nothing to do with my final project, which was probably not the best of ideas, but I wanted to focus on something fresh in my mind – at the time I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do an animation for my final piece or a very long scroll-type painting on a large scale. Neither would have worked well in the gallery space at Paper Arts, so in the end I chose the subject which had ceaselessly been on my mind since the Christmas holidays – DREAMS.

I’d been having a series of very vivid and realistic dreams with massive amounts of detail stored in my memories. I wouldn’t say that they influenced my waking life but I’ve always thought that if someone is in your dream, you have to tell them. A number of people were in my dreams, one person in particular, who also appears in the final images, more so than the others – when I shared my dreams with him, it became a common conversation topic, and a really exciting one at that, which brought us closer and solidified our friendship, something I was immensely happy about. So, in a sense, they actually did influence my waking life.

left to right: Jakeem Lee, Sara Christova (me), Jack Coles, Sophie Holbeche, Patrick Howells, Ayu Baker and Rhiannon Parnis. Unfortunately Heather Kirk couldn’t make it that evening. (photo by Emma Harry, additional edit by me)

Anyway, I shouldn’t go off on a tangent. The opening night for the second week was a lovely event which I thoroughly enjoyed. I got very positive feedback from our year tutor, Amelia, who believed I should go on with this for my final piece. That completely threw me off and I found myself wide-eyed and panicking, telling her it actually has nothing to do with my final piece (even though I’d already been trying to find a way to relate dreams with myths). Her suggestion was that I should find a way to do something similar… ‘because it really does work very well, good job!’

Even though I didn’t sell any of the prints I had on display (I was gutted when I realised I’d forgotten mount board and cellophane pockets) I am really happy to have had the chance to have my work seen by so many people. Hopefully it will have inspired some of them to truly explore and experience their dreams. :)

Definition of my Reality

We got a task to work on a collaged piece depicting our reality. We were given complete freedom for our final outcome and we were advised to check what the Platonic solids were and how they were connected to Leonardo da Vinci.

I could not have been more thrilled. The research I did re-empowered my admiration for the connections between art, science and spirituality. I was once more reassured of the importance of knowledge and the need for deep philosophical conversations and discussion.

When I started thinking about ‘my reality’ I made a little list of words. Chaotic, mind-blowing, beautiful, rushing, lone… but then I realized this was a conscious illusion, the words were coming from a very shallow place in my being. They were my reality but they were just aspects of the whole.

What I came up with is a piece which somehow actually manages to describe my reality and, at the same time, capture universal truths and knowledge, as well as referencing ideas as old as time.

This is my personal final piece.

We each got to ‘present’ our pieces to the rest of our group without saying a word about it, and letting everyone else speak up and tell us what they see, what they understand and what they can interpret, and then see if it matches our own original idea.

It’s strange how I can’t bring myself to write about this piece now; it has become a sort-of milestone of my own personal development, evidence of a moment/period of pure, complete self-awareness and analysis.