The Architect’s Guide to Self-Presentation, edited by Andreas Luescher, Taylor and Francis, 2013.[/caption]
Education cannot prepare you for the real world. When you’ve decided to undertake a degree in Visual and Performing Arts one increases that risk to a forgone conclusion. I needed to somehow plot a career fresh from a study environment that rendered one passionate but ill-equipped to steer that passion into a job. I was lucky that serendipity led me in a straight line (that became an arc) to the Architectural Association, onwards to architects’ offices, an architectural communications company and back to the AA.
I have to confess to not having a CV but rather a list of projects and past employees. Within that list, under subheadings and bullet points alongside sketches, doodles and photographs are the details that form the trajectory of my career.
The Architectural Association is an intense hub of activity. More ideas, conversations and projects are crammed per square foot into the Georgian buildings that make up its home, than imaginable. Many new things are learnt, accepted and then, after some time, revisited and more new things are learnt from seeing them in a new light. This is challenging. Usually in one’s career, a steady build-up of information occurs, where knowledge is amassed and you become an ‘expert’. Exhibitions are more often than not different every time, with a new set of demands and challenges; like the architect who asked us to build him an invisible house or the practice that turned the AA Gallery into a Japanese bathhouse.
There are differences to learn; like those between curating shows and organising them. With curating, you get to be the author, to be visible in a way that you should resist doing if you are organising on behalf of someone else.
VANESSA NORWOODOpinion
Things I have learnt, things I am learning and some things I may never get. (Excerpt from the book The Architect's Guide to Effective Self-Presentation) The Architect’s Guide to Self-Presentation, edited by Andreas Luescher, Taylor and Francis, 2013.[/caption]
Education cannot prepare you for the real world. When you’ve decided to undertake a degree in Visual and Performing Arts one increases that risk to a forgone conclusion. I needed to somehow plot a career fresh from a study environment that rendered one passionate but ill-equipped to steer that passion into a job. I was lucky that serendipity led me in a straight line (that became an arc) to the Architectural Association, onwards to architects’ offices, an architectural communications company and back to the AA.
I have to confess to not having a CV but rather a list of projects and past employees. Within that list, under subheadings and bullet points alongside sketches, doodles and photographs are the details that form the trajectory of my career.
The Architectural Association is an intense hub of activity. More ideas, conversations and projects are crammed per square foot into the Georgian buildings that make up its home, than imaginable. Many new things are learnt, accepted and then, after some time, revisited and more new things are learnt from seeing them in a new light. This is challenging. Usually in one’s career, a steady build-up of information occurs, where knowledge is amassed and you become an ‘expert’. Exhibitions are more often than not different every time, with a new set of demands and challenges; like the architect who asked us to build him an invisible house or the practice that turned the AA Gallery into a Japanese bathhouse.
There are differences to learn; like those between curating shows and organising them. With curating, you get to be the author, to be visible in a way that you should resist doing if you are organising on behalf of someone else.
The 2010 Reading Landscape exhibition which presented a selection of contemporary photographers who work in the realm of the uninhabited.Image credit: Sue Barr[/caption] When you look back, there are fine threads that can be traced through your career. People, interests, questions that can continue to hold a fascination for years. It is important to recognise and nurture them. A love of photography sparked at art college turns into an appreciation of good photography that becomes an understanding deep enough to be able to ask interesting questions of the subject and reframe it in new and interesting ways. The photography exhibition we curated as a department at the AA, Reading Landscape, collected a body of work that did not show any built environment at all. The works were all nominally landscape, although in all the pictures the landscape was manipulated or revealed in such a way that the photographer was somehow present (although unseen) in the frame. The exhibition included work by some of the finest contemporary photographers around.