Defining my practice

I am part of the symposium group, and this year’s symposium on 30 Nov/1 Dec is called graphic / communication / design. It focuses on how our cohort as designers define our practices, which are multi-disciplinary and multi-contextual. Using the forward slash, we are using provisional and continuous ‘conjunctions’ which identify our interest, subjects, methods and positions. Like our work, these definitions will continue to change, but these capture our practices at this moment.

Over the past few weeks our group have been running workshops with our cohort to generate firstly individual sets of ‘slashes’, before forming 8 groups (of 5 each, with 1 group of 6) for the symposium to generate group ‘slashes’ of shared interests. Immediately after the symposium these 8 groups will each go on to generate a group outcome which will be part of the publication for the Work in Progress show in January 2019.

So this describes my practice right now: graphic design / social commentary / text & language / photography / convergences / filmmaking / publishing. Generating my own slashes has helped me define my position, and also in refining my approach to my research paper and symposium presentation. I am interested in the plethora and ambiguity of the obstructions around us, and that they are often the physical manifestation of larger forces at play in the types of spaces that we share. With my paper, I have framed this inquiry through a publication, in order to discuss related issues, rather than looking at individual obstructions. I am looking at obstructions as a whole, part of Bruno LaTour’s missing masses, with the obstructions presented en mass in a gallery (below is the stills gallery, animated). Likewise, the symposium film presents the obstructions as a moving image gallery, an informal catalogue, with occasional related observations along the way.