Illustrator and passive activist Paul Bowman used a cumulative title for his Association of Illustrators article EDUCATE - AGITATE - ORGANISE back in 2008 as a call to arms for educators. It was in response to the state of illustration as a discipline and later in 2017 he referred to that article with another title - Educate Agitate Abdicate.
Why am I telling you this? not because you need to know, but because I really like the use of the cumulative style title, using three verbs. It feels clear, effective and engaging, and it’s a style I have used for my own model of reflection. Make, Curate & Reflect. So after a number of years teaching in various contexts, I have noticed and collected patterns of behaviour, of my students and the problems and barriers they face in creating a continuous creative line of inquiry. My brain naturally wants to solve these for them and in my role as tutor, mentor, teacher or lecturer I regularly come up with tangible solutions in the moment, allowing the student to move through and out of their problem or block.
Make, Curate and Reflect is a model that can help the artist move through a period of not knowing where to go or what to do next. This model is nothing new and is completed by creatives everywhere as part of a natural creative process, but by defining it formally it makes it feel more purposeful and acts more as a tool for when things are going right and that you know you can fall back on in moments of doubt.
MAKE: Making or collating a body of work or series of work, or maybe there’s a series of unconnected works you want to make sense of. Then looking at these pieces all together in one place, on a table, wall, computer screen.
CURATE: The curation can happen in a couple of ways:
1. Thinking like a metal detector and honing in on any pieces that have a charge to them, ie pieces you enjoy, think of as successful.
2: Looking and paying attention to any patterns emerging, then curating those patterns into groups. This could be patterns of visual application, conceptual meaning, or content for eg. Something that brings them together. Editing out any pieces that don’t serve you anymore, or that don’t fit into a pattern or you simply don’t like. Continuity is the corner stone of understanding in creative practice and builds trust for you and the audience and paying attention to what you pay attention to is a rudder for continuity. When the work has too many different things in it it is hard to understand what’s going wrong, so pinpointing any patterns that are occurring in your work can help you reduce the distraction and help you begin to build trust in your work and therefore for your audience also.
REFLECT: So with all the pieces you have chosen out of the entire body of works in front of you, reflect on what is working and what is not. Asking yourself why you enjoy them or not. If you don’t know why, that’s fine keep going, doing this over and over and see what happens, (making new work if possible and repeating the process). By having a series of pieces in front of you and reflecting on them, asking questions of why they work and why they don’t can help you understand where to edit, or change or move forward with or not.
This is a great task for a seasoned pro or someone starting out and if you do this over and over again you are building a library of what you are drawn to, and hopefully understanding further why you made the decisions you made. A powerful piece of work is well considered, where everything has meaning or resonance. The context, content, application and concept. We don’t always know why something works, or why we make something, but cyclical reflection can help us pay attention to what we are making, so we can a build a formula to work with, to make and progress again and again. If you want to find your voice in your work, this is not a one hit wonder and this may need repeating over and over until you create a series that has the continuity you are after, it takes time.
Ebbs and flows in clarity and understanding are inherent in problem solving and therefore creative practice, so having a toolkit of actions to get through the troughs and around the peaks is necessity for sustainability and enjoyment within practice. So reflection is key for progression. If ever in doubt or a place of not knowing how to cintinue, go back to where it felt good, unpack it from there and move through this model and hopefully you will be more aware of what’s working and not and why and how to move forward. I hope this helps and good luck! Any questions let me know x