An Escher-esque Labyrinth
I’m a third year Fine Art Degree student and currently my mind is in brain storm overload!
How do you focus, select and evaluate your visual artistic practices, art works and academic research?
How do you narrow it all down to a more manageable ‘chunk’, that allows you to discern and explore possible ideas without getting lost in an Escher-esque labyrinth?
I don’t have a solution but, I do have an idea on how to help my tangent hopping streams of thought from becoming a jumble of crazed worms on, figuratively speaking, psychedelic drugs. Below is my how to organise myself check list; which, hopefully, will stop me from becoming a crazed woman.
- Mind-mapping, brain-storming, random jottings and weird little doodles that I scrawl onto little memo cards, scraps of paper and post it notes, then organise into groups of subjects and themes by way of a ‘paper quilt’.
- A ‘paper quilt’ is really just a mind map, but constructed as if I was constructing a quilt, block by block. For example if I was considering HOME as my conceptual idea and visual image I would use the word HOME on the centre block of my paper quilt. Around this I would proceed to build smaller blocks containing themes, subjects, artists, theories etc pertaining to the word HOME.
- Once the basic paper foundation of my block quilt structure is laid out I pin it together, literally, with dress-making pins. From this ‘paper-quilt’ I can now start to research in greater depth each of the blocks. Adding and pinning new perspectives but equally remove those that are not relevant at this time.
This is my ‘paper quilt’ method for sanity and keeping me on course with artistic and creative processes and practices as well my academic research. But, if you do see a not very tall, older woman curled up somewhere mumbling into her coffee cup you will probably want to give her a wide berth because the can of worms has just exploded.
