Art and text - writing the exegesis

I am coming to the point of my MFA where I am having to formulate the plan for the written exegesis. I do have a strong grasp on my visual elements, my photographs and lightscapes. As a narrative of elements I can read them well. They feel strong, they convey and speak how I want them to. How then - Do I adequately translate or describe these images via the use of text. The actual written element to my MFA has been giving me a certain amount of anxiety. I get terrified sitting and looking at the blank white void of a piece of paper or a word processing workbook. I am frustrated by the 1.5 spaced linework and the deep theoretical arrangement of my ideas. In my images, how I feel and what I want to say comes very naturally. However, the written part stand so far apart from my aesthetic. The text is bland, long, it meanders through syntaxes and discourses that are heavy and cold.

I have been thinking a lot about how to challenge my written element, how to approach it so that it complements and extends my visual research, not just stands beside it as a static and confusing essay. Speaking with my supervisor, I explained my hesitation, my fear that the images and the text would end up working against each other, not with each other.

She suggested that perhaps I wanted to approach my exegesis as an artists book. A visual/textual (intertextual) combination, that would aim to sew my ideas together, offer a mapping or topological tool to formulate a discussion that works with my visual elements. I think, in my head, I had this surge of relief. This was the permission I was after. It seems strange that you would need permission to explore your own practice, but sometimes the practicalities and expectation of an academic environment weight heavily. Marks, scholarships, applications, deadlines all scream for you to keep working with the establishment. But now I had someone saying that this course, indeed my research area almost craved an exploration using intertextual elements, maybe even a narrative story, meandering the colour and spaces of my images, throwing out questions only to pick them up on a later page, where ideas folded out into big maps, where there could be conversations and notes and diaries, a real examination of the research process, a real confrontation with the idea of writing and the idea of art (are they so different).

So now I am working on how to pull it all together. The visual (I can see) the text (I can hear) the meshing of synapses.

A map is, after all, just another kind of picture.


so.

What do you want to say?
How can many elements help to tell the same story?
Does this show a sense of immediacy or urgency?
Is it cohesive? Can it be cohesive?
Is it accessible, can it be read and understood?
How can my aesthetics be explored through text?
What is the language I want to use?
How do I read art, how do I read text?
how can writing then become an object?

Am I an interdisciplinary professional? Have I just realised how everything connects? How do I allow the text to contribute to my visual work? Is it an aside, or is it essential?