Assignment One Reflection

At the beginning of this first section of the course I decided to pick out a couple of exercises from each of the projects except for those in Project 3 Heating and Fusing. The reason for this was because although I would have liked to try these exercises I do not at the moment have adequate facilities to work these in a well ventilated place.  This is something I will come back to.

I found the folding and crumpling exercises interesting because in the first instance I thought I would not get much work and inspiration from them.  After initially folding paper I was inspired to start looking around for other materials to fold and found that by using the different materials I started to look at the material in a different way.  I started to look at how I thought it would behave dependent on how I treated it and was both pleased and surprised with the results.   

Working through the projects the way I looked at materials continued to change and I found I would experiment more.  I do think that perhaps I could have experimented with a more varied choice of materials in some of the projects but I tended to use what I had to hand.  I have found though that since doing the exercises when I see different papers and fabrics I am beginning to wonder how they would behave if I folded or sewed them in a certain way so I feel that this has been a success for me.

I think I could have taken some of the exercises further especially the puncturing and stitching exercises.  I will take what I have learnt from these exercises I did into my future work and hopefully will develop the techniques further.  I did find that I was conscious of how much time I was spending on a particular exercise and how little time on another one.  Obviously this was because I was not as inspired with a particular exercise for example the cutting exercises.  I think I restricted myself too much with my materials and should have persevered.  This is something I am going to address in the future so that I can take a technique further.  I find it hard to know when I have done enough on a particular exercise.

One area I was unsure of was how to present and label the samples.  Some lent themselves to being attached to A3 sheets.  Some could not be treated this way.  I think that sometimes I was conscious of this and it inhibited the way I worked a sample.  I will in future try to work more freely and not put obstacles in the way of working so that I get more from my experimentation.

I have struggled with my sketchbook work and have looked at textile artists sketchbooks to get inspiration.  I have made myself a plan which includes working daily in my book for at least ten minutes and not to worry about whether what I am doing is right or wrong.