Finding my Practice

Just wanting some opinion- should I publish the results of my survey on here?

Obviously with NO contact details or names!

Reading through the posts I’ve published so far, I’m concerned that I may just be a whiney artist!

Well its been a while since ive posted and in that time i’ve thought a lot about my work and the work of others too.

One of the comments on my last post was to look through old sketchbooks, which I have been doing and it was strange to see what emerged. In my older books, where I was working to a strict project brief written by another person, my sketchbooks are clear, articulate and bursting with ideas. Then later on, as the briefs became less and less clear and it was up to me to set the parameters, the books became filled with confusion, as I looked through them I could remember the feelings of panic and depression as I made and made in the hope that at the end of all the making I would understand what I had created.

Is it better then to start with an aim in mind? Perhaps not a definite end point, but a strict time scale and a defined point of research and exploration.

I still envy people with whom I talk about their practice, I know this one guy who seems to constantly create, going off in all these directions. He has his main project that he works on for his degree, then in his spare time he creates all these other things that he ‘was just thinking about doing’.

I feel so confused!

In my third year I became obsessed with Eva Hesse, I loved her repetitious drawings and sculptures, the simple shapes repeated but each one unique. I started making drawings and series of woven tubes, just repeating and repeating. But there was nothing more that the simple repetition of the object/shape. Why? What did it do?

I still like that work, and I loved making all of the different things that I did- it was so hypnotic and all consuming, creating things that took concentration, time and plently of aching crampy hands. But I still dont get it.