I am making a portfolio for getting a job this summer. I started out with great difficulty, and I now have eight pages that I’m very happy with, but that I just realized won’t print the way I expected them too. No worries, should be able to work around that easily, but it’s kind of poopy.
It’s always exciting to hit the print button on something like this, even when you know it’s just the black and white rough. This semester has been so heavy, it’s really come down to moments like this – hitting the print button at 1:24 in the morning to see the draft of the thing that you want to have looking beautiful by Wednesday at 12:00 – that I’ve had to learn to savor.
Making a portfolio is lovely in a way, because you get to reexamine your work and cast it in a new and different light. What did you want to say with that project, what were you learning? So far, this portfolio is about fabrication, concept, system, and observation. I’d love verbs, but I think I’m okay with these nouns. Looking at my projects with these nouns, I’m seeing new patterns emerge – for one, my delight in pattern that I never would have said that I possessed – I think it’s the joy of something orderly yet a little off-kilter. I see the desire to make something exciting happen in section and the attention to detail that means something quite different than I always thought it did.
Attention to detail is now a mode of thinking about construction – carefully choreographing how materials dance around each other. Where will they kiss, where will they float past, where will they collide, where will they nestle? I always thought attention to detail was in the way one would precisely staple one’s paper; I never thought I possessed it (which, looking back, I’ve always been fairly precise with my stapler, at least when I thought it counted). I’m sure now that I do have it, in droves.
So, will the square format 11×11 set of plates get me a job? I never thought I’d make a square format portfolio, so I hope it doesn’t reflect poorly on me, as I thought it might (for no apparent reason, other than thinking that it maybe says you’re a square). I hope so – I’m going in with the recognition that it’s a work in progress.