Summer Project

After watching the programme on Tourette's ages back I knew I wanted to do something based on the Unconscious !  The brief we got given before leaving for summer was to create an artist book ! Obviously artist books come in all sorts of different shapes, sizes and forms so I had a struggle of thinking what I could do ! The brief was great because it meant that any idea could be applied, however it took me quite a while to come up with something !

I knew I was going to have trouble getting into working over the Summer so I came up with the idea of producing a kind of “diary” This would make me do something everyday and at the same time record what I had been up to over Summer. The idea was to create a daily doodle as well as producing some automatic writing. I would also write a log of what I had been up to on that day to see whether the doodle / writing related to it at all.

Doodles – I began by not thinking about what it was I was going to draw and simply ended up creating random patterns. It was quite difficult not producing similar patterns on some of the days e.g. circles appeared a lot. However I didn’t want to repress doodling these at the same time as they may be significant and be part what’s going on in my unconscious mind ! Originally I wanted to go back and analyse the doodles, however there isn’t really any imagery in them – more patterns and lines which I suppose could be analysed but it’s a lot more difficult ! To begin with I didn’t enjoy producing the doodles so much – I couldn’t really get into them ! However after a while it became a lot easier and it just seemed to flow out of me – I think you can see this progression when you look back at the sketchbook ! I also began to go back and shade in some of the doodles which I think gives them a lot more aesthetic appeal and doesn’t alter anything which I wanted to achieve. I still need to go back and finish all of them for the book to feel complete !

Automatic Writing – This is something I found extremely difficult at first ! To write without thinking about what it is you are going to write is one of the most difficult things to do if you haven’t done it before ! After a while of practicing though it wasn’t too bad ! I was able to just run off words that must of only been in my head for less than a second ! The writing was quite similar to producing the doodles in some ways – the words seemed to flow off each other when writing them down. It’s very strange looking back at the writing. Although some of them are completely bizarre, a lot of them seem to make real sense and are strangely philosophical, with religion seeming to appear quite a bit also which I find very strange ! It’s certainly something I plan to more of !Even though it is difficult to do – the results pay off, it’s very interesting !

Diary Log – This is something I wanted to do alongside the doodles and automatic writing – just to see if they related to one another in any way. Sometimes it relates to the writing – but I can’t really see the relation to the doodles. It is quite a nice thing to look back on however and to see what I had been up to !

I know the brief was to make an artist book and I simply filled a sketchbook but I feel that it’s very relevant to my idea and what I was trying to get from it ! At first I was worried about constructing some sort of crazy sculptural thing, however I think this would’ve been silly with what it is I wanted to explore ! Some pictures of the “unconscious diary” are below – doodles on the right, automatic writing on the left in the centre and then the diary log is the writing around the automatic writing !