MFA // Seminar Week Recap

What a wild start to the year! Seminar week was full on, but such a great experience :) Am looking forward to the next one already. I didn't take many notes or photos as I was too busy being immersed in it all, but here is a quick summary of things...

Kaupapa for the year:

E kitea ai ngā taonga o te moana, me mākū koe

If you seek the treasures of the ocean, you'd better get wet

A small recap of discussions, events and workshops:

• Met the rest of my cohort, and my supervisor Sonya Lacey :)

• Had mini introductions to each others practices and recent work in studio

  • presented my 2022 works Selves (Martha) and On the horizon, just above the waves, but as a smaller scale iteration (the main prints are currently at Sanderson)

• "Art as research": idea that the primary mode of research we undertake is the making we do

• Library and research tips

  • reading around the text; finding auxiliary work to examine the main text through

  • writing as a distillation of ideas; to learn, enrich, orientate ourselves, communicate, etc.

  • starting with key terms around one's practice or field of inquiry
    

• Visited Kate Newby's Had us running with you and Oliver Perkin's The Reserve at Michael Lett + curatorial talk from Victoria Wynne-Jones (who is my other supervisor this year!)

• Artist talk from Joyce Campbell (loose notes below)

  • place - sometimes it may take years to work through understanding it

  • residencies are a little strange as there's this sudden push of time and making, which can be deeply generative but may also feel quite artificial

  • intersection of place, time, and photography; recording capture and processing of time and place

  • "complex form becoming", morphogenesis of form (re. Adam Art Gallery mid-career survey)

  • complex ecologies

  • authorial relationships, figuring out and navigating the ethics of authorship and publications

  • thinking about connections - mediums chosen to reflect the sites/history/subject and image

  • we make images with these technologies; they have weight and consequence; sometimes beauty can obscure trauma, for better or worse

  • book recommendation: What Makes Life Worth Living?

  • be honest about who your audience is; it could be in relationship to a single person
    

• DEMO installation workshop - seeing how we navigate the space together

  • I didn't take any photos of my work unfortunately! Brought On the horizon, just above the waves for projection but it got a little lost in the space as it was tucked away from everything else (though I did really enjoy how it say next to Freya's light sculpture installation and Kim's algal form sculpture)

  • Also really cool seeing it projected on a larger scale (though there are some technical issues to resolve!)

• Literature review overview with Glen

  • "preantepenultimate" review up first: blog post due March 27th
    

• Kerin and I ran off to Sanderson Contemporary for an hour for the closing of their Emerging Artists 2023 show (which we both had work in). Feeling very grateful and happy!

  • as a result, also got to revisit Kate van der Drift's Soundings exhibition in the neighbouring room (which has been a favourite for some time)