Situating your creative practice
The third class session was largely spent in trying to identify where you think you are situated within the contemporary art/design spectrum. This is needed in order to be able to reference your work, to establish meaningful connections whilst you do a literature review in the upcoming weeks. No creative activity exists in a vacuum, there are always links that go back to other works, and to global ideologies, conceptual frameworks and philosophies in which your work is nested. To make this process easier for you I had suggested creating a diagram, and that you could use Sullivan's diagram as a point of departure. I had also alerted you to the fact that Sullivan's diagram has notable shortcomings and that you would probably only be able to use it as a generalized method - that is, using a visual schema for identifying your place in the art world.
Most of you seemed to have a hard time with this. In fact some of you had not even attempted to do the diagram at all. Some of these difficulties rested on a misunderstanding in that you thought that you had to adhere to Sullivan's diagram, whereas I had only intended for you to use it as a start out point. That said, there were two of you that did do a very good job of the exercise. Of these Ece's diagram is below:
Ece Budak, Situated Art Practice diagram, 2012.
Ece situates her creative practice in "socially engaged art" and says that her work has physically taken place across two countries, nestled in her experiences growing up between Canada and Turkey. Nevertheless, she believes that her work has a communal element that relates to specific communities and subcultures rather than countries. These communal works often contain a strong communicative and interactive and participatory element.
On a formal and structural level Ece says that her work has mainly oscillated between sculpture and drawing, more recently moving towards a hybrid sculptural practice that involves many linear/ line based qualities that come from her background in 2-D and mixed media. She aims to further investigate this hybridity and will try to create social, interactive sculptures that focus on communal involvement and storytelling."
She has placed these attributes that cover both formal and ideological elements in a diagram in which many areas and planes intersect.This approach of intersections seems to me to be a very good way of identifying your position since it allows you to blend and combine things rather than keeping them in a rigid formation that in many cases will be ill suited to creative endeavors which tend to be fluid and evolving as an intrinsic part of their nature. Therefore I will advise the rest of you to consider following Ece's method of intersections whilst constructing your diagrams.