Reflection on Feedback from Creative Presentation #1
The most important criticism I received as feedback was the perceived weakness of a social component to my presentation of Buster Simpson and his work. It is true, my main focus up until that point had been on Simpson’s environmental projects, and the vast amount of scientific scholarship that has gone into studying some of the topics he alludes to in his work, namely nurse logs, riparian restoration, and pH imbalances. This feedback was helpful because it gave me an opportunity to narrow my study of Buster Simpson. He has produced a vast body of work, and I was not sure how to choose an aspect of it to focus more in-depth on. The desire of others to hear more about the social impacts of Simpson has led me to focus in on his persona of the Woodman. His performances as the Woodman made some of the biggest social statements of his early career, on the nature of waste in the city. I would argue that the spirit of the Woodman was carried on into his later installation works. Simpson himself addresses this in a video I was very fortunate to locate. In it, he discusses the role of his piece Secured Embrace as the spiritual successor to the Woodman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE6F8P17F_g
This allowed me a more pronounced sense of direction in my paper, but there was as still a social component missing from my creative response, which will take the form of recycled materials, a 3D printed block, and sword ferns as symbolic representations of the ideas discussed in the paper. Many commentated on the prototype of the sculpture that they appreciated and/or were intrigued by the symbolism contrasted with the simple shapes of the actual form. What it was lacking though, was some mention of this social component. At first, I thought the only way to rectify this was to write some sort of paragraph that would be displayed in front of the sculpture, making some comment on restoration that was vaguely connected to the nurse logs. Then, I realized there was a much simpler, and therefore more effective, was to integrate a social message into my work. I took a cue from Simpson and decided to write a simple phrase around the the four different half-tree outlines that will make up my sculpture.
Image from Pinterest
I have not finalized the phrase, but it will be something such as
Our material die but the forests don’t
or
Material dies but trees don’t
This allows me to speak both to the fact that we as a society often do not think about what happens to materials once we use them, and it introduces the topics of nurse logs, that don’t truly “die” because they still contribute to the forest, in an interesting, integrated way.
Another important piece of feedback I received was that people were getting my ideas, but the were not organized in a clear way. I attribute this scattered description to the fact that I have read a wide range on things about the artist, and was myself still trying to see how everything fit together in the sculpture. In response, I developed a chart that traces my thought processes in the symbols of the work and also provides rudimentary answers to my research questions:
If anything, what causes nurse logs?
and
What is the role of the Woodman in Buster Simpson’s work and how is that philosophy carried through in the works of his in which I am examining?
