Speaking to Simon today my main concern was to figure out how to priories between making, research and reflection. My project is quite broad, and ask a lot of questions. I often feel pulled in lots of directions with my research and the complexity can quickly feel overwhelming. Sometimes in my rush to understand and process everything I’m discovering I’m not able to filter, reflect and gain as much as I want from what I’m spending my time to make.
However thinking and exploring in these broad, yet specific ways is the way my mind naturally works, and despite it being a pain to get on to paper, I’d love to build my method so this is both celebrated and made easier to catalogue and process.

I have been getting worried that I’ve fallen behind with my blogging, allowing posts and sharing my research to build up. This build up and lag makes me feel anxious and this in turn triggers a negative cycle, which inturn creates a block when it comes to creating. Ironically perhaps, one of my aims for this project is to help me build a practice and methodology that lowers my anxiety around creating and ultimately soothes and bring joy to me, as I hope my output will for others.

In my proposal I suggested ways in which CBT therapy techniques might be intertwined with my research methods to help me structure them in a way that helps me break things down and break negative cycles like the one I’ve described above. Whereas in my proposal I structured the use to generate and synthesize research into creating, which I have tried successfully (and will blog about on Friday when I repeat the exercise)here I need to apply it to generate cataloguing and recording of my research, which I will attempt going forward in a daily blogging practice and mapping.

• Apply CBT routine and timer techniques to encourage daily blogging. Giving structure and ease by asking 4 questions :

  what did I want to achieve / explore? What did I make ? What have I learned? What next?

• Create and add to mind map of my research so other documentation can become more fluid by being broken down into smaller easier part to manage and see and form connections.

Today’s making

what did I want to achieve?

Today I wanted to develop and synthesise a few ideas in my object making

• having found the use of pegs to create attachments in my ‘getting making’ stacks and the success in my other plywood experiments in creating shapes that could be pieced together game like in many iterations. I wanted to try out how I might use wooden rods.

• having learned about Zen Buddhist Deruma dolls, which are round bottom weighted dolls. When tilted or pushed they always swing back to centre. The movement represents among other things, the repetition of rituals and infinite recentering that the calmness and presence of Zen practice aims to employ. I wanted to try and explore how I might make a shape inspired by this movement.

• This week I found calmness noticing and watching reflections and ripples of water on my walks in nature. I have also been exploring the way forms in nature often repeat and reflect at different scales, and found these images of water imprints from ‘form of nature’ by Strache. I was interested in how these shapes might inform and impart a calmness and connection to nature.

What did I make? What did I learn?
I made this quite odd stacking object. Overall I don’t like it. For many reasons, the first being that the finish was low, I was rushing and the wood cracked. I also don’t like how it looks or feels to hold, and I think it’s clunky in its fulfilment of all 3 of the concepts. Overall it was frustrating to make and awkward to play with - I want to create playful, soothing objects and for me this feels like the opposite. Learning from an antithesis can be useful, so there was somethings to take away - I feel like it did begin to explore the rocking from the daruda doll I had set out to explore, and will maybe try this in a cast or papier-mâché mache ( which is also the traditional material used ) The peg technique worked well to connect the pieces without glue and remaining mono material so I will try this again.