summative project report

Summative project report

Overall, I have enjoyed this project and appreciated being able to bring community art practice into my degree. I am pleased with the success of the taught sessions and the outcomes from the children. I am impressed with the quality of the work created and happy with my role in facilitating it. The lessons linked with the research and writing for this module and I have improved on last year’s project my making this project more of a holistic body of research. The lessons were effective in answering my research question and I am glad they went ahead despite feeling at first that it was too ambitious an outcome. I have also improved my writing and research skills, this year the essay is more concise in terms of research focus and instead of a wide range of sources covering a large topic I have written using a wide range of sources focusing on a smaller area. This has meant the quality of my essay is better and triangulates relevant theorists more efficiently.

Through this module I have developed confidence in the classroom and gained more experience of planning and running my own workshops. This will help me feel more confident and ambitious when approaching community art opportunities in the future. My visual practice has also developed in this module, I have become more colourful, playful and experimental in my work and this is something that will be carried on throughout my illustration work. I wouldn’t have achieved this level of playfulness without specifically focusing on a younger audience, working directly with children, and analysing their visual language in depth.

Weaknesses in my work that could be addressed further are my organisation of the blog and the presentation of my final work. I should have written more academically and reflectively when blogging peer review 1 and 2 at the time they were happening as this would have helped me hit grade boundaries more successfully. I am unsure if my final presentation of work looks appealing and exciting, this is something I have always struggled with throughout modules. I find professional presentation of work difficult and I find it hard to be imaginative when presenting a final body of work for a project.

I am not as pleased with my personal posters as final outcomes as I am with the lessons. I am pleased with the aesthetic of the posters, but if I had managed my time differently it would have been beneficial to explore the application and response of the posters as opposed to just creating them. If I had longer I would gather more first-hand research surrounding my own final outcomes. I would display the posters in public spaces and gather public response such as questionnaires or informal conversation surrounding the work with a specific focus on a young audience. I think this would have helped me to further address my research question.

Overall the feedback from our final mega crit really made me feel positive and proud about the project. The work was summed up using three words from each person; effective, powerful, accessible, positive, empowered, wholesome. These descriptions made me feel like I had really achieved what I set out to do which was to explore how community art can aid freedom of expression. To push my project further I would like to make my posters a free online download for anyone to distribute as they wish and continue spreading a movement of positivity.