# Project Description Where Constraint Meets Release Roz Newby Summary Final work As an artist, parent, teacher, carer, my work focuses on resilience. Finding consolation and strength, art as a strategy for coping and embracing. Being curious and playful. Finding hope and joy in life. Balancing necessary constraints with opportunities for release. I have a diminishing sense of self and an increasing sense of being part of everything. Of the cyclical. Of the eternal return. Of connection. Of being a multi-species entity. My focus is expansive. Open to experience. My desire is to be more in touch. And to ponder upon everything. I am currently based in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. As an artist, parent, teacher, carer, my work focuses on resilience. Finding consolation an... College Central Saint Martins Course MA Fine Art: Digital Graduation year 2025 It’s expansive and cyclical. It’s small and vast. It’s the here and now, alongside everything that has ever been or will be. This is life expressed. A way of processing, challenging, accepting, and coping - an attempt to navigate the quotidian, through the day-to-day, through life, through death, and beyond and back again. Things are defined by constraint or release . Constraint the external. Release the internal. Two elements to express things such as desire versus commitment or the subjective versus the emotive. And where these two meet and vie for control, this contiguous point, is the heart of the matter. And living within and recording this balancing act - the interplay, the thrust, and pull - the increasingly imbalanced relationship between human life and the natural world merges with personal struggles. Yet, somehow, situating the lived experience of a small world within the world of everything - all existence, the eternal return - there is some consolation. My small odyssey placed within the vast odyssey of all life. All formed and acted out in a creative playground. A parallel world where everything is reduced to a manageable size in an attempt to deal with life and death - playing, reasoning, grieving, forming resilience and finding optimism. Responding to ‘the cyclical’ and ‘ eternal returnal ’, things are recycled, repurposed, re-interpreted, re-visited, re-evaluated. As things flow in and out of focus, never leaving, just there, waiting for their time, to be brought back into play. And by building on a ‘store’, having things to hand - the physical, the experience, the concepts - I respond ‘in the moment’. Forming/articulating thoughts during process - process as a means of processing, enabling post-process analysis. Inspiration is more happenstance than sought and it controls the narrative. And what I make seems to exist beyond me and by observing it I try to understand what it is and how it came into being and what it might go on to be (like my own children!). And I sense things as living and animate. And I like to be surrounded by responses, looking, listening, absorbing, engaging - the making is just the start of the process, or my part within it. And the process is responsive - as a need to express happens, a means to express materialises. And outcomes are eclectic and diverse in appearance, structure and process. I sometimes feel as if I’m standing still whilst the world is flowing through me, leaving deposits and, as a result, my mind is filled with the eclectic and, as a result, my practice is a hotchpotch of materials and processes, experience and experimentation and it can be anything - and it can be found or thought, as well as made. Final work Odyssey It’s a storm in my teacup, but it’s the storm of being human, human within something so much bigger. My trials. My tribulations. My efforts to navigate. My mistakes, frustrations. Of being here and doing whilst here, until no longer here, as me. Of trying. Of accepting. And it feels like an odyssey, a fractured story, a sense of travelling across turbulent seas, driven by blustery winds to islands and monsters. Of trials and tribulations. A collated offering of the disparate as a narrative – a conglomerate of being, of my being, my small odyssey within the vast odyssey of everything. Eternal Return An expression of existence. The eternal return. A wrestling mass of reproduction. Of the finite, becoming and then being drawn back into the undulating rotating mass of all existence. The big release. The big constraint. Here There be Monsters Constraint/Release Research and process Studio I’ve gone round and round, mapping, as I have circumnavigated. Travelling to place myself. To understand where I am within it all. John Mortimer’s play, A Voyage Around my Father, has come into my mind. To return home, to nurse and care for parents, turns tables. The adult becomes the child and vice versa. Established relationships are undermined, love is mixed with rage and resentment. All acted out in a narrow space, bound to each other by love, age, illness, need, duty. And to navigate and to survive these domestic tempests, I have needed this course. I was lost. I had given up my life and liberty to sustain my parents’. And they were no longer there for me. What had nurtured, was now attacking. And I’ve travelled in circles, going round and round to find reason. To understand. To see beyond and from the other side. And to keep loving and keep caring. Battling with my own monsters, as well as theirs. And I have done this through my MA. Used it like a self-help, counselling service. Scenarios have been worked through, brought into being. I have been able to confront demons and assess them, process, and understand, and shrink them down, and release myself. And I wonder if I could have coped without this. This axis. I do feel more found than lost and I have found my parents, not my charges. And I have learnt through it - learnt about life, family, community, that giving is rewarding. To see what I have gained and not what I have lost. And this MA feels like an opening, though it has recorded endings, and has been as much about dying as living. View Gallery View Gallery View Gallery Share this project It’s expansive and cyclical. It’s small and vast. It’s the here and now, alongside everything that has ever been or will be. This is life expressed. A way of p... A link to this page has been added to your clipboard Browse related work Archives & Collections Being Human Beyond Human Climate Emergency Community Conflict & Its Effects Mental Health Nature & Environment Materiality Futures Play Story & Myth Realities Histories