Lets play at being lecturers

today was my first day teaching the undergrads. Its unpaid work experience of course - I'm still a long way from being good and experienced enough to get a job as a lecturer - but hopefully doing this will help me develop skills that will help me get paid to do it when I'm finally ready. I'm helping out with the second year drawing elective module: basically its a series of workshops introducing them to an 'expanded field of drawing' as it was refered to today. Then they'll have time to develop their own 'drawings' - used in the expanded sense, whatever they may be - for assesement. I'll also be giving a talk/lecture/presentation on my own work and how that relates to the stuff they're doing, and really this is exactly what my work is about. The idea that drawing - or any form of practice - can be a moment, or a document of an event was what really came across, for me at least (It'll be interesting to see how many of the students picked up on it).

It's been really usefull actually because its given me a new perspective on my practice; I've been thinking about giving the presentation and how I can relate that to this expanded field of drawing and this has made me realise that drawing in the expanded sense is what I do, its all drawing: my video's, photographs, writings (and etc) are all documents of various events, moments, processes, (and etc). This very blog, the words you are reading now are a drawing. I was reading an article today about the problem of presenting 'process based' art. This really struck a chord as I've been saying for a long time that my practice is process based. As I understood it, the problem seemed to be about finality: when is something finished? What is the end product? The problem being that with a lot of these process based practices, the project is never finished, and there isn't any 'final piece' - a horrible term that I've fought against for years because of this very issue - these things are part of an ongoing process. Yet when this work is exhibited, it is read as being an end product, and doesn't really provide enough of a 'way in' to allow us, as viewers, to read the work as part of an self-perpetuating process, which of course it is. With this kind of work there are never any conclusions, only more questions, never any end products, only documentation.