I’ve been struggling with this for over a month, but today it finally clicked!
One of the modules for MA Illustration is called A Question of Research, for which we picked one of five questions at random out of a Box of Mystery™. Our task is to keep a blog as we try to find An Answer, culminating in a presentation and a short synopsis.
The aim of the project is more about how we engage with the question than finding An Answer, and looking at how we actually do the research, to help us develop the skills for our main project.
My question is:
In what ways can subversion develop creativity in relation to practice?
And I was stumped.
Didn’t have the foggiest.
No idea how to start.
Others were talking about how they’ve tied their research question into their main project work, but I couldn’t see how I could do that with the Mashu.
Until this morning.
In a tutorial with Jac Batey, the course leader, and a few others from the group, I was discussing my main project and mentioned an end point I was considering was to write a field guide/spotters guide for the Mashu.
Jac liked the idea and said the spotters guide type books tend to be very serious in how they are written, so it would be fun to apply that to something as ridiculous as the Mashu.
At which point something jumped up and down in the back of my head, shouting “That’s subversion!”
So now I finally have a starting point to answering my question! I’m going to be looking into how you can take serious things, and subvert them to make them ridiculous.
Better late than never!