Contextualizing my work 1

Week 7 at Art School - p.1

Today we were mostly at the "Integrated Learning Resource Centre" - or ILRC - just a glorified name for our library. The ILRC project is mostly about us putting our work in context of what has gone before and what it is like. We are to pick a couple of pieces of our own work (from what we've been doing on the course, or outside, old or new) and then find for each piece, four images that relate to them, and get good and relevant quotes from the artists that have produced the work.

We were given a full tour of the library and its facilities - I'd seen most of the books bit, but now realised they had much more than that (magazines, videos, DVDs, - and TVs to watch then on, audio CDs, CD-roms, slides, computers with photo and video editing software, scanners, printers - including a huge plan size printer, other book binding facilities, a couple of rooms set up with lights and platforms for taking photos of artwork, a materials library with samples and stuff, and a big space with drawing boards, big cutting mats, tables and guillotines for putting together presentations and stuff). It catered well for art students - I'm going to try and make the most of it ...

Anyways, back to the project, we've basically been given next Wednesday morning as free time to wonder round the ILRC to research artists who have done similar work to ours, and then produce a booklet which includes a 250 words summary of how all those artists and their work relates to ours. I'm not entirely sure how to start on this. I might actually do it the other way round and find artists and work that I like and then produce a piece of work influenced by my findings. I don't know yet ... I'm not comfortable with this kind of academic stuff. Fortunately this doesn't need to be in until January.

Eeeep!