Imagine:
You are an art student working headlong towards your final, graduate exhibition. You’ve spent the past three years exploring, developing, honing, destroying, painting over and starting again, falling down and picking yourself up, trying to make sense of it all. You’re nearly there, just a few weeks to go, and then the world changes. Utterly.
Almost overnight you find yourself with no studio to make your work in and nowhere to exhibit these precious results. You can’t go out to drown your sorrows because the pubs have all closed. The only place you can see your friends is on a screen, with no chance of a hug, and you must use your sleeve to wipe away the tears because all the shops are out of toilet paper. Honestly, it really sucks.
So what do you do? You do the only thing you can, and in so doing, join with what every serious artist has done since the beginning of time: you take whatever is to hand and you imagine…
The smallest things then become monumental, be they the walls and Artex ceiling of your bedroom, or the jars at the back of the fridge, or the shapes your pillow makes each night. Movement takes on a whole new level of importance when you haven’t got space to swing a cat, let alone make a 6ft painting, with the most repetitive of domestic acts flowering into a new poetry. How different is sitting down to eat when you can’t share the meal with your friends? What do you do when all your work has been about crowds, but now the people have all gone? Maybe you begin to wonder if your absent friends ever really existed, or were they just ghosts, or indeed, is it you who is the ghost? And in the slippage between ‘now’ and ‘then’ where real journeys have as much substance as cartoons or, indeed, the heightened dreams we’ve all been having lately; when you ask yourself, did you really remember it? These things then become your subject matter.
Plastic bags and old bedsheets become vital materials, intense manual labour and the cobbling together of monsters from scraps turn into honest stands against the increasingly 24/7 virtual world (the one that still tries to sell you things they say make you look better, despite all the shops now going bust). Even when you’re telling yourself you can’t make work, in truth you’re working harder than ever.
Because all of this has been part of you in these past few months, you made art out of it all – the stuff of these new works we now see here. And looking at it now, I know it is profound; art that will prove a lasting document of these most strange of times we are living through.
I really just wanted to tell you how proud I am of all of you for pulling off this most extraordinary feat. It may be a degree show without walls, but you’ve given us an exhibition with limitless boundaries. Thank you.
Christopher Stevens
Course Leader
BA (hons) Fine Art Painting
How to apply for this course