Throughout this academic year, I have been able to raise my skills , build numerous contacts, gain experience within the industry and find career paths I may venture down.
As well as this, I have gained confidence, I had an interview for my Masters Degree and had to put together a portfolio of my work, I also had a Portfolio Review with a curator who works at Photoworks, this helped me gain confidence in speaking about my work – I had to explain my work to those who knew nothing about I, I had to talk in depth about my work and why I decided to make it, but also keep the listener interested in what I was talking about. I am very passionate about the work I have created this year and I hope to continue the projects and adapt them further.
I set up a small shop on Etsy so I can sell some of my work and have more people view it, and since opening, I have had sales which is incredibly exciting.
Over the past 3 years at Plymouth College of Art, I have been able to contact and interview people who’s work I have found interesting, and people who have inspired me. I was lucky to interview Suki Dhanda over the phone after her exhibition at PCA. I was also able to contact artist Vatsal Kataria, he lives and works in India and mostly builds dioramas and then photographs them, I found him to be very helpful for my work. I came across a documentary on Netflix called ‘The B-Side’ it was about an American portrait photographer who used a large format Polaroid camera. I then found her website and email address, so I decided to contact her, thinking she wouldn’t reply. I had a very pleasant and humorous conversation with her that lasted a few days, she was very insightful and gave me advice about selling work and creating exhibitions. Finally, one of my greatest accomplishments. I wrote a letter to Sir David Attenborough, a childhood hero of mine, and to my surprise, he replied to my letter. I decided to write to him again, but this time, I sent some images to him, once again, he replied to my letter and commented on my photographs.
Free Range was by far one of the things I was most excited for, however, due to incredibly unforeseen circumstances, we could not go ahead with our planned exhibition. But I am still very proud of the work we had done to fund the show and plan out the space and the work. I put a lot of work into helping with Free Range and even put myself out of my comfort zone and decided to be a part of the curation team, as well as the social media team;. This is something I would never have considered doing, but I am very happy I went ahead, I was able to gain some experience in curation, which is very helpful as I want to open a small exhibition space in the City of Bath. I would be happy to organize a show again so we can all have the opportunity to experience a large-scale exhibition. Myself and a close friend of mine have been discussing setting up our own exhibition in Bath. Luckily, I am very close friends with the former Mayor of Bath, who now helps with Fringe Arts Bath and other art events. so this will be very useful when I want to display my work in and around Bath. We have spoke about having our own exhibition since 2014 when we visited The Holy Souls Exhibition in Bath. The exhibition was mysterious and eerie, it amazed us how art didn’t have ‘pretty’ like we were always told. It was a new style that we couldn’t take our eyes off of. The work has inspired the both of us, we learnt that we didn’t have to pick just one media, we could combine multiple medias to create something unique and build a narrative that would leave the viewer questioning many things
Although the exhibition couldn’t go ahead, I was still able to gain a lot of exposure – I had my work published by Source, which was an amazing experience, I also had an article written about me and my work by Artists of Meraki. As well as this, I entered a competition that had over 145,000 views, this allowed my work to be seen numerous times, which was very exciting. Finally, I had my work noticed and reposted on Instagram, and in some cases, it was reposted by voice actresses from the extremely popular Rockstar game, Red Dead Redemption 2.