1.4 Reflective practice in art and design – an artist on reflective practice transcript
Blackaeonium is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, archivist, and digital media developer who employs both analogue and digital materials in her work. She has exhibited her art internationally in physical galleries and virtual spaces. In this interview, Blackaeonium talks about how she uses reflection in her creative practice.
Q1. As an established artist, how do you incorporate reflection into your creative practice?
A1. I have formal and informal methods of reflecting on creative practice, and it’s quite messy.
Informally, I’m often thinking about a current project multiple times a day, so I would use whatever is on hand to document ideas or thoughts that arise – which could be writing or drawing in hard-copy notebooks or using a notes app on my mobile phone. I also email things to myself or take photos. More formally, I keep a hard-copy visual journal where I try to collect all the informal and random things in one place. I have also used a private blog to record and document projects, and I created an experimental archival system for longer-term documentation of creative work – not just finished pieces, but the working files and code that was used for certain projects.
It’s useful to look back at past work to inform future work. Being able to look at your creative practice over a number of years often reveals patterns and underlying concepts or themes that repeatedly come through. You can use this information in new work, and it helps to understand your processes and habits, and where you might need to expand or grow your practice into new areas. It’s good to reflect on the direction you want your practice to take – you may want to try different mediums, or collaborate with someone, or change your conceptual framework.
Another type of reflection that can have an impact on your work and how you view your practice is writing an artist statement. I don’t usually write one without a specific purpose such as for a new project, to update my website, or submissions for exhibitions, grants, etc. Each time I write one, I need to reflect on the current state of my practice – each time it’s a little different. I rarely use the same statement twice, or for more than a year or so.
Q2. How has your reflective practice changed over the years?
A2. I originally started out as a painter, but as my practice expanded to include a lot of digital media, and fabric and installation work — the reflective practice had to expand to be able to document different forms of creative work, and my more complex working methods and processes. I certainly use more digital media in my reflective practice now — as I do in my creative work. I’m probably better at recognising what to document, but I’m still not always organised about it, and continue to use multiple methods to reflect and document.
Q3. Can you share an example of a time when using reflective practice had a significant impact on a specific project or piece of work?
A3. I completed a PhD by project about 10 years ago, and reflective practice was a necessary and important part of that. Working on a very large research project over a number of years requires a lot of documentation and tracking your progress so you can then reflect on what’s working and not working. Some parts of my project were failing at various phases, so I had to change direction and try different things to make it work — which it ultimately did.
Part of completing a PhD means developing very sound and rigorous academic methods and practices including documenting reflections as evidence of the research. Your project might completely fail, but you could still successfully use your project research to complete your PhD if the outcomes answer your research questions.
I created a blog for my PhD which was part of the project work I submitted as evidence of my research. It was a very useful tool for my creative practice too because I could search for topics or keywords and see all the content for a particular thing I was working on at the time. I also used the blog to document and backup code I was writing — which saved a lot of time when I lost something or corrupted a file and needed to recover it.
Q4. Do you have any tips for art and design students on starting their own reflective practice?
A4. The most important thing is to reflect often and regularly — make it a habit. And document it somehow because you won’t remember your thoughts later. It doesn’t matter what format you use to document — it could be a visual journal or a blog, or both. It could be text, image, video, audio, or combinations of these. The main thing is to keep updating it often, and don’t be precious about what you put in there. Bad ideas, half-finished things, or failed artworks can be inspiration for another project at some point.
