Studio practice, good progress is being maintained!

Having spent the weekend in some considerable contemplation I have been quite pleased over the past couple of days with the making of my final piece, progressing towards final assessment in a couple of weeks time.

Trying to make meaning in the philosophical sense, whilst actually making art in a physical sense is very intellectually demanding. The idea that visual philosophy underpins contemporary art is a crucial one to me.

What is so often missed by the undereducated critic of contemporary art is that we are simply not thinking just about aesthetics (that is we are not just thinking about beauty in visual images). Our enquiry is much more about how we analyse objects and images built upon our perception together with the metaphors and symbols (semiotics) of what we see. Our understanding of the world around us essentially grows with each fragment of what we believe or think we are actually seeing. It is through this perception also that feelings can be not only transmitted but physically realised.

Ideas that contemporary artists inculcate within their work must, therefore, help to synthesise new or different ideas and of course feelings through viewers perception.

The making of the folds apparent in the fragment of the gnome's face have been likened to terrestrial valleys and hills when observed at close quarter. These ups and downs and dead-end valleys can be likened to the thoughts that I have had throughout this week.

My mind has been somewhat occupied in the development of a presentation of my studio practice which links it to the theoretical research that I have been conducting through Nietzsche and Heidegger, together with the practices of the new European painters movement (Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans and Gerhardt Richter amongst others). The idea that Dr Holmes explained to me a few months ago about the triad of studio practice, theory and research, and the third element being pedagogy, definitely does seem to provide a very positive praxis of my own way of doing, making and essentially behaving as a way of thinking.

I'm still very confident and comfortable that my choice of object and its own unique emergence as a truly valuable piece of contemporary art (and in the word valuable, I mean rich in metaphors, concepts and layers of meaning which a viewer may choose or choose not to pursue, in their attempt to understand this work).

Progress continues in my practice in a steady but determined way. Whilst there have been some challenges in trying to keep a balance of studio practice, production and output; and at the same time maintaining positive momentum in the repainting and tidying up of the whole of the studio complex, in preparation for final graduation assessment and then the graduate show, the work has been quite intense.