1.3 How personal do you want to be?

Key words from the brief:

Using the 4 mini books from Exercise 1.2 visualise ways you could hide the books, or some of the information contained in the books
Research into book structures that hide elements
Mock up ideas of what your structures could be like
3D tests based on your mock up ideas

Sketchbooks are always personal to a certain extent because they contain an artists unique view or interpretation of their world.

So personal content is only a ‘problem’ if the subject matter or themes, or the way they are addressed in the work pose some kind personal risk to the artist. Examples would be an artist working in a politically repressive regime or dealing with/exploring/expressing thoughts or ideas that are challenging/difficult/problematic in some way.

And for me, at the moment at least, this isn’t true and the line between what I want to keep private and what is public is clear.

Three different approaches

There are three different approaches that I could take towards dealing with the risks of working with personal material:

Remove /avoid the risk altogether – Keep private work completely separate from public work
Reduce the risk – hide or obscure the private work in some way
Accept the risk – Combine private and public work together and accept how other viewers of the work will react and/or what this might mean for you

Ideas for how to deal with the risk

I do accept that this is going to be an issue for some people, but my response to generating ideas comes from my own situation where this isn’t a ‘problem’ I have to deal with.

So these ideas for how to reduce the risk are tongue in cheek…