The Importance of Peers

Whilst getting feedback from my family members had been useful when it came to reorganising my thoughts and redirecting my editing, I was still a little unsettled walking into class this week. Due to the mid-semester break it had been quite a while since I had gone to a workshop and it made me feel quite isolated. It was almost like the feeling of a family gathering with estranged relatives, I didn’t quite know where I stood.

The reminder last week that I must accept unprofessionally was burning on my scull because the opinions of my peers had a different meaning than that of my parents. My peer group represents a cohort that I consider myself to be a part of. Our relationships with each other express our deep human need to justify our existence; we use each other to reflect and create meaning, the make sense of the world… and so when I enter into the room that is filled with all the other ‘un-professionals’, I finally have my point of comparison, my point of reference.

I know that a straight up comparison to my classmates is unproductive, and yet a very primal part of my mind seeks to place my work among theirs. After not being in this environment for a while I felt the need to rearrange and reassess, to reimagine my place within my cohort. A fearful part of the back of my mind whispers to me that it is possible they have all left me, technically, behind.

I was placed, this week, with people I hadn’t conversed with much in my class and we shared our works to each other, giving feedback. What I found far more useful in this exhibition, surprisingly, was the works of others, not their advice to me. What they had to say was very similar to my parents, but as we all scrambled to explain our works, describing the issues, hopes and complications we all faced I realised that these people were closer to me than I had given them credit for. I could see that, just like me, they were struggling with an imagination that outweighed their skillset. They too were just trying to fumble their way through this initial awkward introduction to a craft we all hoped to pursue professionally. We all had different talents and mindsets that had brought us to this little room on a Thursday afternoon, and we all faced a litany of completely different obstacles in the way of pursuing a more balanced and dynamic skill set.

This weeks workshop really hit home for me that no one was managing to create something perfect and, if they were, that meant that they were too scared of failure to attempt to improve. The room was filled with a diverse group of people taking to the task of creating a portrait with different mindsets and different obstacles. All of us are facing challenges, thats what this program is all about, and our creations were made more compelling because of it. Everyone had apprehensions about displaying their work because we had all faced challenges, and we were all scared others hadn’t. As I settled myself into my chair, listening to the experiences of others, I felt a sense of composure in the fact that we were all experiencing growing pains, and that we all had a long way to go before we were professionals.