- Venue
- Wirral Metropolitan College
- Location
- North West England
Blog – a web log, a shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies; postings on a blog are usually in chronological order.
In order to write a review about the Degrees Unedited blog, I surfed the net last week to find the ‘official’ meaning of the word ‘blog’ considering that my Collins Dictionary does not have the word in it. A few web ‘free dictionaries’ had meanings, one mentioned communicating anxieties to the psychiatrist, I smiled at that one. This feels almost true of some of our blogs, maybe Degrees Unedited had unwittingly become a group therapy session, and it certainly felt that way to me sometimes.
You get out of blogging what you put in, if you want to just have your name searchable through Google that will work, you can write an odd line or two, throw in an odd picture and show your lecturers that you have ticked one more of the academic boxes citing use of Information Technology.
Or,
you can use the opportunity to really gain something from the experience. Degrees Unedited is utilised for the final year of your Degree, a time for experimenting, a time for ascertaining your practice, we all have to log our findings and diarise our research for purposes of academic marking. That can sometimes feel like a bind when you are in artistic mode and wanting to produce art, not pages of written evidence. Via blogging, it becomes a kind of ritual that can be cathartic in some ways – opening up and writing down what disasters had happened or what ideas had sprung to life that week.
Regarding ‘a shared online journal’, I have to admit I kind of forgot it was shared back there for a while – I felt I was just writing down my experiences for myself, then once in a while (or quite often in some cases) you find that someone has left a comment and it brings you down to earth with a bump. The first time this happened I was really shocked that anyone was reading my blog – it’s obvious that people can, it’s on the world wide web for goodness sake and I was certainly reading other people’s blogs but still it came as a shock to me. It was then that I thought maybe I should keep a check on what I was saying……. but that only lasted a week or two and then I returned to just writing for me.
The blogs have made such interesting reading at times, some people really opened up, some really vented. In one of January’s blogs Erin Rickhart wrote
“To be honest, I cannot wait until university is finally done. I won’t have to jump through any more of these ridiculous hoops for people who simply do not care.”
I always loved finding little treasures like that amongst the quotes, you know exactly how people feel and you empathise, we’ve all been there. That final year is fraught at times and you do find yourself worrying not only about your course work and results but beyond; about your future as an artist.
Another of my fellow bloggers,Tom Duggan, said last March “I don’t know what the point of doing this (a) blog is. It cleans up my thoughts, but I don’t know why that needs to be done publicly. I am unsure of this whole blogging process, could it do more damage to me as an artist than good? How secretive do you have to be about your practice?”
This thought had crossed my mind too at times, your ideas and processes are out there on the net for all to see. Is it arrogant to wonder if anyone out there is copying your ideas? I mean why would they, we’re only mere students. We put ourselves and our work out there for all to see and ultimately that is surely what all this is about. I have actually been offered a space in an exhibition for CoExist Arts in Southend-on-Sea on the basis of the work they have seen through my blog.
We all want our work to be seen, to be recognized. Some of the other bloggers made me quite envious of their talent and I certainly want to see more of their work, I really enjoyed watching the art from planning stage through the various stages of progess into seeing a final piece. There are names of artists from this year’s blogs that I will be looking out for in the future.
I also liked the fact that some of fellow students from Wirral Metropolitan College were blogging alongside me, I would look forward to logging in to see if they had posted anything. A group of print students from our college were fortunate enough to participate in a trip to Utah where they resided and worked with students from Brigham Young University. They blogged throughout their trip via Michelle Rowley, one of our lecturers, each writing a piece throughout the three weeks. It was really enlightening to see the facilities the other college had and to see Utah through their eyes. I felt that this type of short term blog worked really well, maybe more college trips could be covered this way.
What next – for me it’s an MA part time over two years so that I can carry on working, I am lucky enough to work for Liverpool Biennial and get to meet so many prolific artists, I feel I have much to learn from them. Also more blogging ahead, I can’t imagine stopping now. I have started a new blog called ‘Welcome to the jungle’, it’s a jungle out there in the art world and I look forward to talking about my trek through, recording my progress and sharing my feelings and views.
It will be really interesting to see if the format of fellow bloggers will change now we are out of Degree’s Unlimited and into Artist’s Talking. I think it’s inevitable that they will evolve this year, I’m intrigued to see how.
I wonder how many final year Art Degree Students passed through all the UK universities and colleges over the last twelve months, the figure must be vast, yet only a tiny proportion of them used blogs on artists newsletter. What a wasted opportunity, come on people – get a grip this year and get blogging, you honestly won’t regret it.
