I was going to include an extract from my journal. I remembered writing in it just before Christmas and thinking that I had reached an important point in my work and ideas. I had just had a group crit and a tutorial from a visiting artist which had given me new ideas and allowed for helpful discussions.
The journal writing I thought would express this succinctly and reflect the energy and focus I felt at the time – might be interesting to others at the same point in their final year.
But actually on reading it through it wasn’t how I had remembered it. To be honest it sounds quite pretentious – a flurry of creativeness darling! ( I am laughing at my sense of the dramatic now!) But it did serve its purpose at the time, however silly it might sound on reading it back, at the time it cryslaised my flow of thought and consolidated ideas for new work. I have taken those ideas forward and am working with them currently.
That’s the amazing thing about reflective writing – its a powerful and transformative process. Its the writing down of ideas, events and responses as they happen that is so useful. The writing captures your thoughts at the point at which your creativity is fully engaged. And you cant capture all your thoughts and the intensity of it all the next week or possibly not even the next day – being in the moment is literally just a moment and everything starts to fade soon afterward.
In this sense the journal is for me an active ongoing record and reference point that I need to always have at hand. Its not attractive in anyway – not an aesthetically pleasing object as some journals can be – it has a sense of spontaneity, even desperation about it. If it was a person you would say it had just rolled out of bed – scruffy round the edges after a long night’s sleep full of dreams !
