With the last final hand in looming, I feel happy to have achieved so
much in the past few months. My practice has advanced greatly, and I feel ready
for the future. Unit X has enabled me to complete the aims I set myself at the
end of the Practice unit, these were to develop my practice whilst still being
experimental, enhance my online presence and build both an online and physical
portfolio to a professional standard, maintain and build new networks, and work
on a collaborative project. I feel that I have achieved these aims to a high
standard whilst managing my time well. In the last couple of weeks before the
assessment, I need to finish my final samples, check my portfolio has been
conducted to a professional standard, and make certain I have fulfilled the
learning outcomes for this unit.
I feel that I now know who I am as a designer. There is a part of me,
which continues to hold a love of embroidery, and beading and heavily
embellished fabrics, with the most intricate of details. This laborious work is
something I would like to continue from time to time, it is refreshing to
combine the two ways in which I work; combining my heavily woven bright chaotic
samples with my profoundly time consuming and intricate bead work. For my final
few woven designs for the Manchester School of Art Degree show and New
Designers, I intend to fuse these ways of working to portray my working style
and myself. I now know, that as a designer I always want to work with sampling.
I enjoy being able to produce a design, appreciate my newly created fabric, and
then move on to the next idea relatively quickly. I feel that this is a good
way to work, as if I am ever to sell my work, I will constantly need to be
ready to make new fabric designs. I have
learnt the importance of making each sample different; samples too similar to
one another wouldn’t sell in the real world. In the future I need to continue
to focus on creating an array of samples, ranging from the simplistic and
effective to the more strenuous attention to detail.
Research has been and will continue to be invaluable to my practice. It
is important to be aware of the work others are producing around me. It has
also been extremely useful in order to help me build my work to the same
professional standard as designers working in the same direction and has
enabled me to advertise my work in the correct manner (Maja Johansson, Georgia
Fisher etc.)
The way I have directed
my practice this year has meant that I am confident that I have a breadth of
work with different styles to show, different techniques and strengths. I have
also worked towards several different contexts, showing my versatility as a
designer. Through my interviews so far for internships, it has become apparent
to me that I must never stop working with colour, as this is what I have been
told is one of my major strengths.
In the final weeks before
the assessment, I am now focusing on preparing my work to its most professional
level, through my physical portfolio, online presence and creating business
cards to allow people to access my work, all of which will be crucial to making
connections and networking through New Designers and the MSA Degree show, as
well as the foreseeable future as a post graduate. I am extremely excited to
have my finished portfolio, and to see the outcome of the collaborative
photo-shoot, I feel it will be an excellent way to summarise our collaborative
project, particularly as the samples have been extremely time consuming, and
they deserve to be shown appropriately and professionally.
