Four years of my BA Fine Art Degree has come to an end and it is time to move on to the next stage. How that next stage rolls out will depend on many elements, firstly how I do with my Masters in Fine Art at NUA (part time over two years), alongside this I will be looking to help the Recruitment and Outreach Team as well as continuing my Design service for a few clients. It will be a matter of balancing all these three aspects and spinning a few plates along the way.
The result of four years and the silly hat and gown bit.
Having helped the previous year I had an idea of what was going to happen as well as being present for both our children's graduations. However, being on the other side of the fence was a unique experience and something I am incredibly proud of. Finding out I had received a First Class Degree was something I hadn't even thought about when I started this whole chapter, it was just about engaging with the course, getting as much out of it as I could and looking to create in a new direction.
The next bit.
Before we had even graduated as a year there was the small matter of a show in London. A selected few of my year were invited to take their work to the old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane to be part of Free Range (http://www.free-range.org.uk/), a show for the regional colleges to have representation in London. This logistically was a challenge but something everyone got involved in. For my personally I had to look at how I could take the concept of the wall of eyes blinking the messages and recreate in a totally new space. After discussions about how I could potentially create a new wall that was too problematical because of the location and available space I decided to look at the idea of creating a set of individual plinths that contained an eye each. This meant cutting up the wall and using the spare bits to create three plinths, each with the ability to be connected to power and removable lid to allow access to each phone.
I decided to make each plinth at the height of the person being represented to support the idea that each eye is at the eye height of each blinker. This created a little 'family' of plinths that could speak to each other depending on how they were positioned. By turning the wall into plinths it changed the dialogue of the piece, it broke it up but also gave each message their own space and the ability to 'talk' directly to the viewer. It felt each piece had broken away and actually come alive. The interaction between viewer and piece could be more concentrated and individual.
The NUA students put together a tight show and virtually every artist had developed their work from their Graduation Show, sometimes with new work or re-iterated work, it was certainly a real buzz to be in London and showing our work. It is certainly something we can all add to our CV as we emerge from the cocoon of our degree.
there was a real buzz about the show and all the hard work to get the pieces there, up and on view were certainly worth the effort. Going around and seeing other universities work was also an excellent opportunity to see how our contemporaries had developed and presented their work, especially as we had all studied through the pandemic. One of the negatives was that there was a lot of Photographic work on display and this rather dominated meaning the Fine Art element was quite a minimal part of the whole show and therefore the people coming to see the work having to deal with the striking contrast between the two disciplines. Overall, a great experience, exposure and opportunity.