Keeping Up Momentum Student Stories – 27.2.21
Keeping up Momentum is a student-led initiative designed to connect, inspire and motivate OCA students. This session features three students stories to inspire and motivate.
Speakers:
Jane Coxhill BA hons in painting:
There were lots of interruptions to her journey, personal circumstances but the OCA supported and encouraged her and she continued and has now achieved a first class degree.
Hugh Hadfield just completed level 2.
An illustrator with a practice rooted in observational drawing and an interest in reportage, documentary and “the slightly strange”.
Sarah-Jane Field 1st class degree in photography.
Sarah-Jane usually works as a photographer but also works for a local housing co-op, writing blogs She received marks of 90% for her last three modules; for Digital Image and Culture in 2019, and for Body of Work and Contextual Studies in December 2020. https://sjfsyp.wordpress.com/ and was the reason I signed up for this session flagged by course leader Dan Robinson. I have met Sarah Jane before on study events,
My notes on her practice:
- Her work is a shift away from a western linear view of reality towards a more entangled and relational reality and a connected interest in mark making.
- Works as a commercial photographer as well -suggests dissolving boundaries between research and personal life
- Influenced by Judi Marshall “Living life as an inquiry” (1999), who talks about noticing if our actions end up reinforcing the systems we aim to interrogate, deconstruct and instigate change; and Sarah-Jane began to wonder if photography does this.
- During self and other and digital image and culture made her explore the importance of other digital technology
- Level 3: Her final project eschews the idea of a linear forward facing time arrow and the passing of time non-linearly. Her contextual study was on other types of photography to expanded moments of production.
An interesting quote shared: “Cartier-Bresson’s style of photography is still possible, still practical and celebrated, but its importance is marginal…other types of photography have become more culturally significant, ones which often involve a shift from the single moment of capture to the expanded moments of post-production” (Daniel Palmer, 2015)
- Currently she is looking at mark making and makes work with other people’s photographs.
Reflections on the session:
Tips on assessment:
- Explain about what you’ve done, overcome difficulties, thought processes, the complete journey – your work doesn’t stand alone.
- Cross discipline work.
- Difference between the pace and depth between level 2 and 3: Need to put the work in to get creative sparks, so commit to photographing.
On Problems with momentum:
- Doesn’t hurt to take a break at times
- Value of the OCA to their practice
- Use lots of lines of enquiry to inspire work
- Study whatever interests you
- Use your personal experience in your work and ties this into your academic questioning
Padlet and shared drive: https://oca.padlet.org/helen416376/zrlacdumwrd4za6y
References:
Judi Marshall’s Explore: Living life as an inquiry https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Person-Action-Research-Marshall/dp/1412912148
Marshall, J (1999) Living life as an inquiry At: http://www.jmarshall.org.uk/Papers/1999%20Marshall%20LivingLifeasInquiry.pdf
Palmer, D 2015 lights, camera, algorithm: digital photography’s Algorithmic conditions in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer &:Nate, tKacz (eds), Digital Light (London: fibreculture Book Series, Open Humanities Press, 2015), 144-62.
Photography 2: Documentary 