Sophie Douglas MA Professional Practice

Lots discussed during last nights's Skype call centered around the notions of knowledge, learning and information.  Part of the conversation flowed between ideas around embodied knowledge, and the challenges around capturing, analyzing and finding or making meaning from our lived experiences. I've continued to think around experimenting filming parts of practice, as way of capturing data to reflect on for the purposes of my studies, and the inherent advantages, limitations and ethical considerations around that.  Many interesting questions around the relationship between performing artists and audiences came to light after Rhoda shared her emotional response to being filming during a performance without prior permission or consent, and it's jogged my memory of Anna Halprin's notion of 'witnesses' (Halprin, 2019), which I'd like to unpack further. In her writings about her creative process, Haplrin suggests that whilst an audience member might come to a perfo...

This week I've spent some time reading over the proposal I submitted at the end of module two. Firstly, it's interesting to reflect on how, the closer I edged towards the deadline date, the more challenging it felt to tie things together, to have actually have something to submit that reflected my journey across that module in someway. Perhaps that sense of struggle is rooted in an understanding that actually, the learning doesn't come to end just because we have to meet a deadline! Secondly, I've understood that writing from my practice is integral to my learning on this programme. I can have a tendency to loose my own voice behind the academic language I'm grappling with around my subject area. I'm approaching this term having heard this very clearly, and moving forward with an understanding that our own voices are absolutely at the core of our research, and that the literature around our subjects supports us to contextualize what we are exploring/investigat...

Settling back in.... It was good to reconnect with the MAPP community during the 'Welcome Back' Skype call last week. Whilst a lot of the info talked about wasn't necessarily new, I was encouraged to hear it again from a more confident place this time, and hopefully this means approaching module 3 with a little more clarity about what I'm interested in/passionate about/curious about/familiar with or inexperienced in.  I thought I'd share a few things that I've experienced over the summer as a way of framing this blog post. Walking, noticing, thinking.  I recently visited an exhibition by a local artist, Tony Kerrins called  Walking and Drawing . Since relocating to the SW and inspired by his love of the coastal and rural landscapes in Dorset, Tony exhibited a collection of paintings, drawings, notes from a sketchpad and prints; most of them beginning with a walk. I was particularly interested in his approach to creating work, sometimes getting out a sketchp...