Proposal and Initial statement

Project Proposal

My Initial Statement

I propose this project to explore the visualisation of music.

My aim is to develop my previous artwork expressing music which was quite a representational rejuvenation of the aura of live musical experiences. Here I want to question how to capture an aural musical experience, focusing on the dimensions of listening and feeling. This will mean that it will be important to interpret the terms “visualisation” and “art” more broadly than I have done so far.

The subject matter will be my favourite music, as listened to in my personal space, in my bedroom. As an illustrator I create my artwork alone, where I am surrounded by inspiring music and visual stimuli. This is my creative bubble.

I appreciate that listening to and experiencing feelings of music is extremely subjective. I will be trying to capture the magic and aura that I personally feel during a music listening experience by expressing and translating this visually. Therefore, my responses will not necessarily be easily appreciated by others and the pieces will need to have confidence in themselves. As such, whilst the outcomes may not be meaningful representations for viewers, I hope that they will be appreciated as instinctive, raw and genuine expressions.

As a creative, I experience both music and art in increasingly interconnected ways. I want to use this project to draw on my combined passions of art, music and tap dance to explore how they can be used to fuse and express one other. These elements are very important in constructing who I am musically as a person and an illustrator. It will be a very personal ‘passion project’.

Due to this being a huge holistic investigation of how to portray music, it is apt that the media used is interdisciplinary. I intend to combine the arts through; capturing movement through video, snapshots through prints and honesty through painting, all in an abstracted manner.

I predict that the development of this project will be more important as experiments than refined final pieces. Therefore, to capture the experience of this exploration I think that the use of video documentation will prove invaluable.

I anticipate that this project will be difficult to set boundaries for. The concept of aura is exciting and enveloping but is untouchable and precious. Therefore, trying to capture aura is likely to be ‘impossible’. However, I plan to explore ways in which I can try and get closer to capturing such special experiences.

I will need to consider how many songs and bands I visually investigate and what is enough to sufficiently explore it from different angles. I feel that this project will be the start of something much more long-lasting and become my practice.