Making the Future - one step at a time

Every once in a while, I am asked the inevitable. “So what’s Nottingham like?” My answer- Two weeks of fun followed by a week of serious project work. A team of 13 individuals from different MA courses came together to create an experience, a collective picture of their individual journeys and a consciousness of what was to come. Having used this excellent opportunity of working in a team with various like minded people, I came to realise that even though we all come from different cultures, there is something about art that is in union with our selves as a whole.

Our group brainstormed together for about an entire day till we came up with an idea for the project. Using our native culture and experiences as a backdrop, we started working on an illustrated collage which would eventually form the words “Making the Future”. The reason we chose this phrase is because it is synonymous with our Institution and its core ethos.

While working on the project, I saw how my group mates represented their culture in the form of drawings etc. It was a visual treat to watch how our individual efforts in making this collage led to the forming of a dynamic piece of art. How it all came together to create “Making the Future” is a paradigm of what we’re here for.

Working together as a team taught me how to manage time and responsibility. Also, communicating with students from different countries and academic backgrounds helped me understand their ethos and co-work towards a common project. Along the way, I picked up a few words from Chinese, Greek and Irish and it really got me curious about their respective cultures. The project aided me in getting a fair idea of how people from different academic and social cultures work and how this opportunity can be maximised to create art.

The aim of the project was to embark on a journey and along the way, gain experience on both academic and social aspects. Although our project wasn’t an account of our literal journey, we tried to bring in aspects of our personal journeys from back home and incorporated it in our project. Our success remains in the fact that we were able to develop a strong bond among us as group mates and more importantly as friends.

In the coming weeks at Nottingham Trent, I hope to learn more about different people and their cultures and use this knowledge to develop my own personality and style as art in general is a mélange of different styles. I would like to explore the psyche of how people think, daydream and what they encounter. It is fascinating to create a piece of work out of something that would otherwise seem absurd and pointless. However, I would like to use this very subconscious state of people’s minds to figure out what they see when they don’t want to see anything and how this can become a wonderful piece of art. A good example would be me day dreaming about flying animals and paper towers. This may seem incomprehensible but it leads to developing a thought process that delves into the way people perceive reality.