Back in the studio
Haven’t updated my blog in a while. To catch you up to speed, I’m doing my honours year in viscom design! I’m writing this as a little “life update” with just my thoughts on how it’s been going so far. I felt like I needed a space to talk about something other than my work and research itself.
How it’s going
It’s going good! I’m genuinely horrendous at conceptual stuff. I think this is really pushing me to ideate and just constantly think about my design work more and what I'd like to make and for whom. I’m actually really enjoying honours a lot and I don’t think I’ll ever have any regrets doing it. At the end of third year, I was actually really dreading having to choose to do honours – as I got an offer for it but also didn’t really want to do another year of uni which at the time seemed like a lot of desk research. Honestly the desk research is fine; it’s design. I wish I was a more philosophical or conceptual person but I’m sure I’ll be able to pull together something.
Cohort dynamic and studio workspace (ft. a love letter to the couch)
Everyone is so full of personality. From what I know, this year’s honours cohort is abnormally larger than the previous years’. I haven’t talked to everyone, but with the people I have talked to, they’re all really friendly. Also loving the studio space. It’s just a classroom-sized classroom but we have a couch. The couch is stupidly comfortable. I’m sitting on it as I write this right now! I wake up at 6:20am in the morning so I can get to studio before everyone else just so I can take advantage of the couch. It’s actually crazy how comfortable the couch is. A few days ago I was lying down on it and a classmate didn’t even notice that I was on the couch, probably because of how sunken into the padding I was.
It was brought to my attention a few days ago that when I got back home on Monday at 8pm I barely spent 9 hours at home before going back into the studio the day after. I think this studio space has genuinely become like a second home for me. The couch is stupidly comfortable, I can just leave my stuff here overnight, there’s a fridge and a kitchen. Um… We also have a hair wall!
The work
Without giving away too much, I’ve been looking into the idea of “place” in an online space. Lots of website stuff. A bit of making websites myself. Not much to say to be honest. Other than that, there’s some writing stuff to do as well. I’ve been trying to develop my tone of voice, and trying to get more comfortable in writing in my actual real tone of voice. It’s just such an odd feeling when you’ve felt like you’ve been forced to write formally/academically your whole life, I feel like I’m not allowed to be writing like how I talk. I started this blog initially as writing practice and to develop my tone of voice in writing a bit better. By the time I get home (which would be around 6-7pm usually) I’m already feeling completely lazy.
Yesterday I saw the red=meltdown exhibition in Chippendale. Definitely more of a social/pub event rather than an art exhibition, but the works there felt really relevant to what I was doing. Felt like I had a light bulb moment when I got home and reflected on the works at the exhibition a bit more.
Other thoughts
I’m writing this to get myself into the swing of writing because I have an abstract and bibliography due tomorrow. I’m actually pretty on top of that, I have it basically done but I would like to review it one last time and submit it tonight so I can just have Friday to myself. I’m not that much of a confident writer because until I started this blog, writing always felt like a chore or mandatory task to me. I wanted to develop a writing practice that was something I enjoyed and wanted to do. I think I’ll conclude this now because my stomach is starting to hurt a bit and I’d like to get my abstract and bibliography finished up as soon as possible.
Any thoughts? Let me know here!