An exhibition of work by art, design, media and architecture students from Manchester Metropolitan University
Jon Hannan
I have been researching into working through the notion of a personal aesthetic; examining the notion of a personal style, why do I do what I do, what am I interested in and what is that thing I call a personal style?
Although my practice is ongoing and will continue to evolve, I wanted to give it some shape by identifying a set of ideas that are important to my practice and how I might go about mapping that over the coming years. I have been deeply questioning my working habits and practices as well as the materials I work with and how I work with them. It's an investigation into a personal aesthetic and image making.
I now understand my practice and have identified key ideas that are present throughout it in all my experiments in various media. I have gained an understanding of what my practice is. I'm interested in editing and not telling the audience what to think, but instead letting them create their own interpretations. This permeates through all the different aspects of my work. I now know the power of potentiality and how I can create this by bringing together two or three simple elements. I'm interested in what is omitted or masked and the energy that is created by these decisions, the energy of restraint. This goes someway to explaining the mystery of my own style, but it's something that I am yet to grasp in its entirety, it's an ongoing process that will evolve and which I will work on constantly as an illustrator.