project eden: talking about my master's final project

A little rambley introduction to my thought process for my MA Illustration project.

Cover photo: Julia Kadel on Unsplash

I’ve been studying an MA in Illustration for just over a year now, and I am in the final year of study which will eventually involve writing a dissertation, and creating a final creative project to curate and exhibit. My original motives for going back into academia, specifically art school, were entirely selfish and, perhaps, naive. I have always loved art. I would entertain myself as a child constantly through drawing, storytelling and crafts. I pushed myself to do a GCSE in Art despite my high school teachers warning that I didn’t exhibit the correct level of self-discipline for the qualification. To an extent, I understand why they accused me of this - I was a daydreaming child who avoided wearing the one disability aid that would help me include myself in education (to this day I wonder how much I missed by refusing to put on a hearing aid nobody could really see), and I was a child with an obtusely, overactive mind. Past teenage years, every creative endeavour, I would procrastinate because of ironic perfectionism. If I didn’t understand something, I would refuse to admit or ask for help because that would seem like ‘caring too much’, and as a British high school girl, the most uncool thing you could do was showing that you cared about your grades.

I still went on to study Art and Design at college, but continued to live in a, honestly daft, denial that I needed to wear my hearing aid. I would navigate workshops based on body language and context clues alone, and indulge in self-pity if I struggled with physical creative mediums; “I’m just not cut out for textiles!” “I’m just not born to do screenprinting”. I wish I could go back to my college self and tell her to get a grip and push for help with the things she struggled on.

So in a way, my Masters has been a chance to remould these educational experiences. (Unfortunately, the catch is a lifetime of repaying student finance but let’s be ignorant to that for a minute!)

I am very excited about my final year project. I look to ramble about it and share my own personal ties and feelings to themes in the project here on my substack. I’ve nicknamed anything surrounding it as ‘project eden’, and I will be the first to admit that is cheesy. It is most definitely a Sleep Token reference.

But, if you allow me a vain moment of self-romanticisation, I also sometimes ponder on the name ‘Eden’ if I ever chose to have a child. The name Eden to me symbolises a genesis of a subsection of myself. Something that intends to be separate from me and will eventually grow to have it’s own narrative, but is built based on my experiences and how I have viewed the world.

So cheesy. Anyways.

Throughout our beginning modules for this trimester, we’ve been encouraged to choose words that fit our creative practice. I’ve often gone for gothic, poetic, sublime, melancholic and contemporary. I admit, I have my own case of rose tinted glasses for the creative world of the Gothic. I love the dark, dreary colour palettes, the subversion of Romantic literature interwined with psychological horror, monsters and folklore. I’ve been really drawn to this concept of almost a ‘y2k goth’ renaissance - the renowned Twilight colour grading, accessorising with plastic jelly bracelets and a studded belt improperly worn, progressive rock climbing the charts that experiments with both incredibly moody and dark lyricisms but also the high energy and electronic influence of Nu Metal. I can almost picture the iconic MSN sad girl statuses of the late noughties, littered with wilted rose emoticons and hallmarked with the ‘xXx’ frames.

It’s an incredibly interesting vibe for me, to put it lightly. There have been plenty of films and TV shows in the last decade or so that have sparked this interest for me. Nosferatu from 2024 was especially memorable. I also look to Mike Flanagan’s filmography as inspiration points - The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass really shining a light on obscure supernatural experiences being a parallel to real life trauma.

All I know so far, is I am really keen to gather some research and create something that explores the allegory of the ‘woman’ as the house. My immediate thoughts go to literature like Wuthering Heights, The Yellow Wallpaper and Rebecca. I have also recently picked up a secondhand copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as I have heard this novel also has theory analysis that might be of interest to me.

I’m really excited to delve further into my project and my research, and eventually use it as jump start point for physical creation across poetry writing, printmaking, handbuilding and painting.

Here’s a recent experimental crafting piece I messed about with in University the other day. It’s fun to have a hot glue gun.