When I started this project, my original aim was to explore the dichotomy between Nurture and lack of it; and how the presence of one can make you feel the other more severely. I planned to use my home environment for a rich source of visual and conceptual inspiration and I hoped to utilise my experiences to guide me through this topic. I also wanted to look at this project as a stepping stone instead of an opportunity to dwell; I liked the idea of looking at things from a childlike perspective with the knowledge I have gained in my adult life. To do this I have been exploring the craft materials I would typically play with as a child with my parents help, such as weaving. I found inspiration in Eva Hesse and Toshiko Macadam’s work due to their sculptural use of textiles and the techniques they use to adapt the materials intended use. Aiden Koch has also been important for me to look at because of the way she explores sequential art and writing; I found myself writing memories that I could translate into visual stories. Moving through this project I have not explored the two sides of the dichotomy as strictly as I intended to. My approach has been a lot looser as I have reflected more on my own experience. This complicated the theme a bit because its hard to look at things objectively and it feels against my instinct to talk critically about the relationship I have with my parents and my experience with receiving nurture. I have struggled to produce as much work as I hoped. I feel that when I make work related to my experiences, I complicate it so much that it can’t be understood by a viewer and when I make work that is distanced from my experience it feels too obvious and lacking depth.

I would like to have created a lot more work but have found it difficult to know where to channel my focus. I think my strongest work so far has been my weaving experiments, I think that they look the most interesting whilst staying relevant to the theme. This is largely due to being told that I need to concentrate on examining every possibility within one area of exploration. However, I can see lots of points that they could develop further perhaps incorporating them into my video experiments and also look into how I can use the imagery of milk and my disgust of it, as I can see lots more opportunities for a strong link to the theme. During the Mid project crit we discussed the idea of sewing the weavings together to make a blanket and also how far I could take this strand on the theme of nurture. I think this is important to consider and continues my question of how I want to handle the balance between visual and conceptual focus. Alongside enjoying the visual aspect of the weavings is there a way to strengthen the concept by bringing my writing into it? The general advice from the crit was to diversify my approach whilst continuing my main focus in parallel. I agree that broadening my research and churning out more experiments will benefit me and also help me to feel like my final work is based on something more solid.

After the crit I felt mostly confused and lost interest in what I was doing, I couldn’t tell between what was good or bad. It has taken me a couple of weeks of thinking to actually recognise what advice I need to take from the it. The feedback has helped me to realise that I need to clarify what I want to achieve with my work, It has also allowed me to step back and see what others feel is most interesting. I think by doing this I can see that my intentions are a bit lost currently but I now know that broadening my theme to be an exploration into what nurture itself means could be a lot less restrictive and naturally will bring more possibilities. Realising that a person’s experience of nurture is rarely black and white will allow me to explore the contradictions within it. Using the feedback from the crit, I want to find a variety of areas that can offer more opportunity to support what I have already done. I can see my work evolving to have something sculptural at the core and presented alongside and supported by my written work; maybe this collection of different focusses will be relevant for the nuances of the theme.