In January I was asked by Margaret Huber and Graham Rawle to return to the University of MA to give a talk to the current cohort of the MA in Sequential Design/Illustration. It was a pleasure. I talked through how my project had progressed over the 2 years and also I tried to impart some gained wisdom of what I had learnt along the way. It was great to be back and lovely to be able to talk about the camp again. I can't believe how far I have come from my first year presentation where I was on the brink of tears. I still get nervous but enjoy talking about my work and trying to help others through my own experiences.
I finished on the point because for me it was the most important. For me the MA was much much more than my project. It was much more than making a book or making a film, much more than telling my story, it was also about learning about myself, a time of transformation.
I read this quote from Peter Korn' book 'Why We Make Things and Why it Matters' which had helped me make sense of how I was feeling on the MA - "The simple truth is that people who engage in creative practice go into the studio first and foremost because they expect to emerge from the other end of the creative gauntlet as different people ... There are many motivations, often overlapping and not necessarily rational or conscious or even admirable. But whatever our motivations may be, the bottom line is always the same: we engage in the creative process to become more of whom we’d like to be and, just as important, to discover more of whom we might become. We may make things because we enjoy the process, but our underlying intent, inevitably, is self-transformation."
This MA gave me confidence and the space to develop my ideas, along with discovering capabilities I never knew I had, and enabling me to become the person I wanted to be. for a while it was like seeing myself as someone else, and then I began to feel like that person. And that’s when it all came together.