“To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”

Planning is something I always do. Being realistic is something I try and do. Simplifying is something I aspire to do.

I have listened and been relieved and inspired by the fact that some of our tutors and visiting artists also gather and shuffle their research and investigations as part of their process.

In the prototyping talk on Friday Alkesh Parmar talked in length about developing our work through trial, error and inspiration. He mentioned his own processes -he has a lot of ideas which he develops in parallel , postponing or discarding ideas that don’t work due to imposed constraints. These constraints are usually of a practical nature, he mentioned time, finance, and space as examples.

The discarded ideas are not bad ideas, they just can’t work this time around. One of the video clips played mentioned imposing added restraints to streamline ideas, this could be useful to simplify my working process.

Alkesh concentrates his energy on developing the ideas that are producing the best possibilities of coming to fruition. After the talk I asked him if he had a way of organising his processes.

He answer was simple, he found the best way to organise his process is to be very disciplined. Each project and idea is kept in separate notebooks which he religiously updates and keeps in order. I had wondered if he had found some new program that would store it all.

With that in mind, I finished collating and ordering my images, notes and digital info from ”investigate”. I drew up my time table for the next 6 weeks, having completed 1 week already.

As I don’t segregate my work, play and life -way to difficult to predict- it is a busy schedule. I shall have to be quite ruthless to make it work. I intend to develop and up date it including results and findings where appropriate at the end of each week.

I shall probably use my old log sheets as a template on a blog- they have worked well for me before.

My only concern is that I don’t have a single final outcome.

I’m beginning to realise that maybe the way I work. I don’t want a single known out come yet it would make it rather boring. I may need a banker as Luisa calls it. Or a get you homer as my husband describes it. l need to list my ideas and narrow them down to see if I can find the strongest most realistic idea/s to develop and a safety net just in case, otherwise I shall have an impossible task. I have accepted that I may end up with a synergistic outcome composed of multiple pieces.

Adams prototype exhibition plan comes to mind. This would fit with my previous practice, where I showed drawings, paintings, sculptures and prints that had been produced over a two-year period- they were displayed in similar frames on similar plinth and were connected by subject matter.