What does a 'cohesive body of work' mean?

In last Sunday’s Webinar Surfer's Zoom chat we talked about the art magazine BOOOOOOOM and its Call for Artists.

We discussed the phrase ‘cohesive body of work’, and whether that necessarily meant a laboriously produced body of work.

I argued that it didn’t.

I said that you could make up something pretty fast to respond to this call for artists.

Maybe I inspired myself!

I took a series of photos yesterday, when we had a lovely fluffy fresh layer of snow, and spent a bit of time running filters across them - I took a couple of hours to get 6 images parsed down to how I liked them.

At art school, you learn to work fast. You have no option as there is a mountain of assignments to keep up with, but it's good training too: you should never spend a load of time on a bad idea or bad composition (or in business, time and money on a flawed idea).

My training was to try it out and move on.

Of course, that has left a bit of a legacy of not getting so many ‘finished’ things done.

But this is where a call for artists offering a book publication begins to sound like a great idea...?

Instead of reading the brief and thinking that you would never have enough finished work to show, think, what can I quickly make for this opportunity.?

Even if you are not one of the 6 artists selected, that process of pushing yourself to produce for the brief is catalysing!

Have I convinced you that rapid is good and valuable - and that it can be easily elevated with a bit of slick presentation (like a book publication) into final?

Or does work that is made quickly have intrinsically less value?