Depressurising in March (and the end is nigh)

Greetings students! It’s March!

Under pressure?

If you are a second year DP Visual Arts student in a northern hemisphere school, you may be feeling pressure to complete work in the different course components, because the time for end-of-course uploads is approaching.

It can make some panic, and even the most organised may feel stressed at some point…

See Under Pressure

Queen & David Bowie – Under Pressure (Classic Queen Mix)

How to depressurise?

I’m not going to go through IB final upload deadlines, because your teacher is likely to have set school/art internal deadlines for you. But there are some things that might get overlooked or side-tracked in the next month or so, so here are six things to remember, in no particular order.

1. Measurements and medium/processes

All of your submitted exhibition artworks must be accompanied by information covering size or duration as well as how the artwork was created. It may be useful to start doing this now rather than leaving it to the last minute, especially if you have already decided what artworks you will display/submit.

Moderators can get exasperated when encountering unhelpful “Medium used” texts, e.g. ‘various’, ‘general’, ‘yes’ etc.

2. Texts explaining, and titles of, artworks

No, not the curatorial rationale: I’m referring to the allocation of 500 characters in the “Text/Topic/work focus” box and how you title your work. The ‘work focus’ space allows you to be more specific about a piece than is catered for in the Curatorial Rationale, so use it wisely, e.g. what are your intentions for this artwork?

The title of the piece can also be important – leaving all artworks as ‘untitled’ is a waste of an opportunity.

3. Process Portfolio and Comparative Study Bibliographies acknowledging your sources

This is required for both Comparative Study and Process Portfolio, but the upload for each is slightly different: for the Comp Study you will upload a separate ‘sources’ file, whereas for the Process Portfolio the sources should be included within the single PP file. Please note that the PP sources/acknowledgements do not count as extra ‘over the page limit’ pages: for example, it’s OK if your PP has 25 pages and your sources pages make that a 27-page total.

4. Sources and citing in the Process Portfolio

Every image used within the process portfolio must be appropriately referenced to acknowledge the title, artist, medium and date (where this information is known) and the source. When you are aware that another person’s work, ideas or images have influenced your conceptual or developmental work, the source must be cited at point of use and must also be included in a list of sources: so sources must be cited at point of use as well as in a reference list/bibliography/works cited list.

Also, it is not just about images. If you present images or ideas that have come from research, the sources must be acknowledged, such as in text that analyses the work of another artist.

5. “Double-dipping” in the Process Portfolio

‘Double-dipping’ refers to an academic honesty issue that is more accurately known as duplication of assessment, which is when a student achieves marks in two or more areas of study for a single work of art, i.e. the same work is submitted to meet the requirements of more than one component.

But it is permissible for you to include images of resolved work, in its final state as included in the exhibition, as a part of documenting the process of producing the work in the PP (in a context of beginning, middle and end) as long as the final version is indicated as such (e.g. “This is the final version of my work as seen in my exhibition”).

But also remember that process portfolio examiners assess the process, rather than the product.

6. Publicise and celebrate!

Your art exhibition may well be the art highlight of the whole school year, so publicise and celebrate it!

Have a reception! Put up posters!  Tell the local media about it – inform newspapers, local TV, relevant online sites etc

Invite parents, students, teachers, school administration, the general public etc to come and see what you have been doing over the past few years!