A conversation with Julian centred on how to condense my outcome to its most salient meaning. He highlighted that I have accumulated a wide variety of materials that don’t necessarily belong all together. I can confidently exclude whatever doesn’t belong, for example, my walk, the mud samples, and even the live drone-filmed experience have no privileged place in the exhibition and I can choose not to show them. They were part of my journey and have helped me get to where I am, but each needs to justify its visibility in the final piece.
Julian commented that it helps to think of splitting the components of a project into separate exhibits or even exhibitions. In that way, in your mind’s eye, you are not excluding anything but partitioning things together in logical groups and over a logical time scale. This can make it easier to pare an outcome down to a confident resolution. I worked this process through in my own mind and it backed up what I have already considered for my final outcome, i.e. suspended sheets, waterwheels, and still images. Exclusion of the other elements is not a dead end but merely a junction in the road and other outcomes may emerge in the future.
A further conversation with Tom gave me confidence in the potency of using lo-fi hanging of layers of material as a backdrop for my booth. Along with discussion with peers, a lo-fi presentation was considered to have a retro aesthetic with a softer, more retrospective feel to it and this is exactly the scene I want to conjure up to entice the viewer in and show them the beauty of and threats to the landscape I have explored.