day 1

I'm not sure if I'll manage to sustain this blog but here goes. I'm embarking on a new journey, for me at any rate, looking at my own creative process in the context of practice based research.

Based at the University of the West of Scotland, (UWS) within the School of Creative and Cultural Industries, (CCI), I'm looking at place, in particular, islands, and that elusive connection which inspires a creative response from artists.

So far, I'm reading and trying to understand where my own creative practice sits within the bigger picture. I seem to have written about 33,000 words in my research journal so far, writing obviously isn't a major problem! But these are reflections, notes on reading and tend towards rambling, I suspect. It's the transition from this kind of flowing writing to the academic writing which fills me with a kind of dread....will it become just like everyone else's? Will I lose the essence of who I am as an artist? In being objective about the subjective, where am I in it all? Does it matter?

Alongside the reading sits my creativity; I'm a practitioner who thinks. I need to make, it's a compulsion, a way of life and one that I value above all others.

The image at the top is what I'm currently working on; silk, painted/manipulated and suspended within a given space, slowly rotating in silence.