I've been quiet on all my social media the last few months, life sometimes just gets in the way. I've now begun my journey into the world of a Fine Art MA, something that I've been excitedly anticipating starting since before I even finished my BA. It's been good getting back into the swing of things, talking to my tutors again, and stepping foot inside the School of Art once more. After having to leave so suddenly, with no chance to say goodbye to a building that has felt like home when I've been so far away from my own, the physical feeling of being inside those doors once again is something I never think I'll forget, I feel sorry for those in my class that did not continue their studies at Aberystwyth for not being able to experience the euphoria I felt on my first day back. Things are still a bit up in the air, of course there is now a one way system in place within the SoA, and I will have to book time in the darkroom as opposed to just turning up, but if all these measures mean I can continue to work inside the building then I welcome them all with open arms.
I am taking my MA over the course of two years, this gives me ample time to find a project direction and really focus in on it. I've got a lot of loose ideas running around my head at the moment, things I wanted to explore during my last project that didn't really fit with what I was doing, things that I tried to do during the last project but couldn't complete for a variety of reasons (looking at you, super 8 film), and things that I have discovered throughout my time as a photographer that I would just really love to experience for myself and experiment with. I don't feel any pressure to come to a decision on where this MA is going quite yet, I'm going to take this time to dip my toes into as many directions as I can, to fully explore and get a taste of what each direction could become. I think this is important to the way I work when I'm immersed in a project. I remember writing about the choice to focus my project on my Dad last year, how I had chosen the theme of landscapes but didn't know precisely how to display this theme, then in a talk with one of my tutors ended in me realising I wanted to do landscapes because of my dad and that perhaps doing the project on my fathers interaction with the landscape was the perfect thing to do. The feeling that hit me the moment this was decided was intense, and I kept that intensity throughout the whole project. A strong feeling and connection to my work is something I thrive off of, so trying out and experimenting with all the ways I could go about my MA is something of a must for me, a way of searching for and chasing that intensity that I feel is so important to the ways in which I work.
To start with, I'm am looking into pinhole cameras. I have dabbled with pinhole photography briefly in the past during my first year of undergraduate studies. We were given flat-pack type wooden box cameras which we had to load up with photosensitive paper in the darkroom before going out to take our one shot at which point you had to take the camera back to the darkroom and develop the negative on the paper. I am looking into making my own 35mm pinhole cameras, one I am constructing from scratch and one I will be making out of a lens cover and my Olympus OM-1. Depending on how well either of these experiments go, I would like to look into moving onto a 120mm film version too. The use of film rather than the photosensitive paper will give me the freedom and ability to take the camera further from the darkroom to take shots, it will give me more time before I have to reenter the darkroom to reload the camera, and it will give me the ability to create multiple positive prints with a much greater ease than my experiences with non-film pinholes. This particular direction hits my physics interests greatly, how the plane the film sits on needs to be positioned in relation to the pinhole lens, measuring and calculating the size of the camera itself, in the case of one of my self constructed builds then its also calculating and implementing with precision a curved surface to produce panoramic images. All of this plays into my deep love for physics that I don't get to indulge in like I could before I swapped degree schemes from Astrophysics to Fine Art all those years ago.
I'm incredibly excited to get this all underway, I'm just going to keep an open mind and explore all that I can until something sticks in such a way I feel I can create and curate a meaningful and expressive project worthy of exhibition in a gallery.
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