Body Project

I'm not going to lie, this project was brutal. Perhaps the most emotionally and mentally draining project we've had this year. I think part of the difficulty for myself and our group in general is that we were trying to coordinate the efforts and ideas of three people, all of whom approach art very differently and wanted to go in very different directions. I prefer the approach of exploring material and building a concept out of a workable vocabulary rather than trying to express an idea first and foremost and letting the medium arise from the concept itself. I also usually try to be conscious of the time commitment required for most projects because I find it really difficult to put in more than fifteen hours a week at the studio outside of class. However, with this project I felt that I was fairly discouraging of some of the projects that were discussed early in the process because I thought a lot of them were too ambitious, so when we finally settled on a material to use an an idea for it I was wary of raising my concerns about the time constraints. They were probably valid, however, because I don't think we were able to create a piece that was as large as we would have liked it to be, and scale was a very essential element to the piece that was somewhat lacking in the final result. Overall, I'm just relieved to have this project over. I feel like the individual strengths of everyone in our group were lost in translation and that our attempts at collaboration really led us to create something that was an unhappy compromise of all of our ideas.