OCA North Meeting, Halifax 10/11/19

OCA North Meeting, Halifax 10 November 2019

Venue: Fletcher’s Mill, Dean Clough, Halifax

The plan for the day was:
• a presentation on his work by tutor, Andrew Conroy (photography tutor)
• general discussion
• presentation by participants of their OCA work

Presentation by Andrew Conroy
Andrew described several aspects of his work. These included a project he has been undertaking for some time about Orgreave, documenting the present state of sites of significance during the period of an active mining industry in these areas. To this end he also showed images of a series of walks he did around Barnsley including former coal mining sites. A theme here was the “re-greening” of these areas – often with little reference to their former uses.

He also described his collaborations with other artists and how his work has then been modified and adapted to create something new.

General Discussion
There was a helpful discussion about “research”, and writing, with particular relevance to the more advanced courses.

Presentation of OCA Students’ work
Several students presented their work). I presented the images I had prepared to date for Assignment 3, Decisive Moment.

Other photography students (Level 2 and 3) presented their work, and there were a set of 4 paintings by another student.

My Aims and What I Learned
I had similar aims from attending to those for previous meetings;

To gain a greater understanding of studying with the OCA
A major point I learned is that there is a librarian for the OCA who is available for advice regarding literature searches and databases of journal etc. This is something I have struggled with greatly since studying with the OCA. I am familiar from bio-medical research with various search techniques but have failed to find these for the arts discipline and resorted to general search engines such as Google, which I think does not have the academic validity of other methods.

Practice my assessment and appraisal skills
I was able to give feedback on four abstract paintings. Of note was that the student presenting the work has four very specific questions to structure the feedback around. I found that I was able to make, to me, apparently sensible and it seemed helpful comments for her. I relied to some extent also on criteria described by Grayson Perry in his book “Playing to the Gallery”, albeit I think a little tongue in cheek.

Gain a better understanding of other art disciplines and influence on photographic work
The collaborative work of Andrew Conroy demonstrated to me how other arts disciplines can use elements of photographic images to create new novel artworks, probably classifiable as “visual art” rather than any more specific discipline. However, his collaboration was not limited to visual art, but also included images as part of a work with a poem, analogous to the collaboration between Fay Godwin and Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet.

To present my own work and get feedback on it
I took contact prints and prints of the six images I have shown on here.

Suggestions were to crop image 2019-09-17 #02-13

– my own thought is that cropping closer to the couple on the seat implies they are more important than the setting and pattern of the arches, and I will leave as it is for now.

There was a comment about the “tactile” quality of the prints, perhaps particularly because of size and the texture of the paper (pearl finish). This highlighted to me the significance of the uniqueness of a hand printed image.

The image 2019-07-30 #22 was described as “having a lot going on” to the lower left side and I agree this does make it difficult to work out where to look at the image. Its composition does not lend itself to easy examination.