Personal response, and choosing what to make work about
Art & Design · GCSE · The School
Choosing a subject that lasts
A GCSE project runs for months. 'Nature' is too big to hold a project together; 'the way light moves through the leaves of one tree across a year' is specific enough to sustain one. Test a theme by asking whether you can list fifteen different things you would make about it.
Figurative work is not required
Exam boards set broad themes and accept work in an enormous range of forms. Portraiture and life drawing are common routes and they are not compulsory ones: still life, landscape, architecture, natural form, textiles, pattern, typography, product and abstraction all reach the highest grades. If your family avoids depicting people or animals, say so to your teacher early and build the project on one of these — it is a straightforward conversation and a legitimate route, not a compromise.
Depth over breadth
Better one theme explored through six media than six themes touched once. Depth is what the mark scheme calls sustained investigation, and it is also more interesting to make. If you are bored by week three, the theme was too thin — change it early rather than late.
THEME: 'structures'. The first response everyone has is bridges and skyscrapers, and it will look like everyone else's. Narrow it to something you have actual access to: the scaffolding on your street, the frame of your grandmother's loom, the stacked crates behind the corner shop you pass daily. You can photograph it repeatedly, in different light, and nobody else in the country is making that project.
Access beats ambition
The practical test of a subject is whether you can get to it repeatedly. A theme built on something two hours away, or only visible in summer, or requiring permission you do not have, will quietly starve — you will run out of primary source material in week four and start working from other people's photographs. Something on your route to school, in your kitchen, or in your own hands can be revisited fifty times in different light, and fifty encounters with an ordinary subject makes far stronger work than three with a spectacular one.
Sustaining interest when it goes flat
Every project goes dull somewhere around the middle, and abandoning it there is what produces portfolios full of unfinished starts. The flat patch usually means you have exhausted one way of looking rather than the subject itself. Change the variable, not the theme: work much larger or much smaller, in a medium you have not used, from an angle you have avoided, or at a time of day you have not seen it. If three changes of approach all come out dead, then the theme was too thin, and that judgement is worth writing down as evidence too.