Part Five - Building a Collection: Laboratory or Factory?

At the start of Part Five we are invited to consider this quote from Chris Ofili:

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

The two key words here for me are laboratory and factory.

For me, a factory is a place where things are made, but they are usually built on some kind of production line, involving many people and making 'products' that are similar, if not identical. Having worked in factory, I know how it feels to be engaged in repetitive tasks all day long and know that it required me to disengage from the task, whether by listening to the radio or allowing my thoughts to wander, in order to be able to repeatedly do the same task all day.

The way I see this course so far is not as a means of making finished products, just ideas for them so far. I think that these ideas form a dialogue with myself, my tutor, future assessors and other students

A laboratory for me is a place where experiments take place, but they also take place in the real world, when medicines are tested on real patients and healthy volunteers, in order to prove their effectiveness and test their safety.

I agree that an exhibition is not a complete conclusion, but I think it needs to be a waymarker or milestone of some kind, even if it marks the point that signals the end of a particular style favoured by an artist, or perhaps the end of an obsession. I think artists need to be obsessed in order to deeply explore a particular area, but then will often move on to something different, whether a different subject matter, style or dominant material.

In the same way as we can never know how much an editor may have contributed to a written work accredited to a writer, there is also the issue of the curation of the exhibition, and how pieces are selected and arranged in order to make sense to the viewer or tell a particular story.

I think that some exhibitions, depending on how they have come about, may be conclusions, and others not so much. Surely there is no such thing as solid conclusions, an exhibition is an arbitrary stopping point. There can be many versions of an artwork, with one piece feeding into the next, in a process of continuous learning and study, striving towards the creation of something new, which I think is a characteristic of most artists.

I think we can interpret the word conclusion in two different ways:

• the end of something such as a story

• what we have learnt as a result of an experiment.

I agree that an exhibition shows the results of experiments and I think that I would like to finish this course by showing a group of textiles that have been inspired by a single source, but that go off in different directions. I would like to be able to show these to people and explain my thinking the processes I have used to produce them.

I can view my work as the sum of 'what I have learnt so far' and that the work I produce by the end of the course could be gathered together to form a milestone to mark and celebrate this point.

I have often considered in the course so far why I am doing it. I am not sure I know why. It is hard to explain it to myself or others and leads me to reply in various ways:

• Because I enjoy it

• Because I feel I need to

• Well, why does anyone produce art? (Or create anything else for that matter!)

I think that I am interesting in developing my creative curiosity and I know now, as an older learner, that being able to carve out a space in a busy life to do this is very precious to me. I have learnt that even if the time I have is 15 minutes, there is still something valuable that I can do, perhaps a small sketch of an idea, or some reflection on taking a piece of work further, rather than waiting for a whole block of time.

I consider my work so far as definitely work in progress, although I wonder if I will feel the same at the end of Part Five, as the focus here is to produce a 'collection'. I am sure that I will look at the work and think of ways to take it off in other directions, develop it further, change the scale, materials or techniques used in order to produce something linked but different.

I definitely value my experiments, and have tried to approach this course by trying techniques that I think I will enjoy and be able to gain some level of skill in, in order to see what emerges. I have tried to balance planning and experimentation in order to develop interesting ideas and responses.

Every time we experiment, whether by using new sources, new techniques or new materials, new results emerge. We can plan our work in advance, sketch, imagine, work things out in our mind's eye, but the doing brings the possibility of going off in a new direction, when something unexpected happens. I think that I have started to trust in this process and not worry about whether what I am doing it 'right' and trust my ability to interpret the course guide.

In Part Three: Colour Studies, in which the book was the conclusion, I found it gave my work more value to collect it together and bind it together in a book, effectively to 'publish' it. I was more comfortable showing this to others as I was proud of how it looked and the format it was in.

I will wait and see how I feel about the work I produce in Part Five.