Use investigation and research to support and drive the development of a personal visual aesthetic in your artmaking.

What this dot point is asking

A central aim of Module 2 is that your investigation and research should drive the development of a personal visual aesthetic. A personal visual aesthetic is the recognisable visual identity of your work: the consistent choices about subject matter, media, colour, mark-making, composition and treatment that make a body of work look like it came from one particular maker. It is the answer to the question what does your work look like, and why. Developing one deliberately is what separates a set of competent exercises from an emerging artistic practice.

It helps to distinguish aesthetic from a few things it is not. It is not the same as a single fixed style imposed from the start; an aesthetic emerges and refines through making. It is not taste in the sense of what you like to look at; it is what you actually produce. And it is emphatically not copying an artist you admire. An aesthetic built by imitation belongs to someone else. The course expects research and influence to feed your aesthetic, but the result has to be transformed into something of your own.

The process begins with investigation. As you research artists, experiment with media and respond to stimulus across Module 2, you generate a wide field of possibilities. A personal aesthetic forms when you start noticing which of those possibilities keep returning because they feel right to you, and you choose to pursue them. Maybe you find you are drawn to fragmented compositions, a restricted earthy palette, heavily worked surfaces and themes of memory. Recognising these recurring preferences and then consciously developing them is the core move. The diary is where this recognition happens, because patterns across many pages become visible only when the work is gathered.

Influence is the engine, but it must be metabolised. The healthy relationship to an influence is to extract a specific strategy, test it in your own context, and keep what serves your concerns. If a researched artist uses layered transparency to suggest the passage of time, you might adopt layering but apply it to your own subject and palette, so the device becomes yours. Many artists draw on several influences at once, which is protective, because combining and adapting multiple sources almost guarantees that the result is no longer any single source. Aesthetic is what survives when you filter influence through your own decisions.

Consistency is what makes an aesthetic legible, but it must coexist with development. Across a body of work, recurring choices, of palette, media, treatment, recurring motifs, signal a coherent aesthetic. Yet an aesthetic is not a formula to be repeated; it should deepen and evolve as you push it. The skill is to hold enough consistency that the work is recognisably yours, while allowing enough growth that it does not stagnate into a trademark. This links directly to the coherence you will need when you resolve a body of work in Module 3.

Be wary of two failure modes. One is having no aesthetic at all, where every piece looks like it was made by a different person chasing a different influence, so the work never accumulates an identity. The other is a borrowed aesthetic, where the work is polished but is plainly someone else's visual language with the subject swapped out. Both are avoidable through honest reflection in the diary: ask repeatedly what is genuinely mine here, and what am I just borrowing.

Document the development explicitly. Annotate why certain choices keep returning, why you abandoned others, and how an influence was adapted rather than copied. This visible reasoning is assessable evidence that your aesthetic was developed through investigation, which is exactly what the dot point asks for, and it makes your eventual artist statement far easier to write.

A personal visual aesthetic is the payoff of genuine investigation: by noticing, choosing and refining the choices that feel like yours, you turn research and experimentation into a visual language that an examiner, and a viewer, can recognise as your own.