Fine Art: Sculpture students are agile, creative and innovative individuals who think through doing and making. They interrogate the physical and conceptual potential of materials, sometimes they invent materials, often they repurpose them. Students experiment and test ideas in physical space and through their creative journeys they make artworks that comment on and ask questions about different aspects of our human experience.
The 2020 final year sculpture students have developed an exciting range of approaches to addressing contemporary concerns. One student, for example, uses casts of the surface of trees to reflect on the relationship between humans and nature. Another creates installation, performance and screen work to discuss loss, longing and vulnerability. Another constructs installations using theatrical tropes to question expectation and illusion asking what constitutes success or failure?
Sculpture students practical research and development in the final year of the course culminates in resolved artworks ready for public exhibition. Artworks are often in the form of objects, constructions, installations, screen works, drawings, live and screen performances, photographic or sound works.
Preparation for the public exhibition is a time of hard work and ambition, a time when students reach beyond what they might have thought they were capable of. A time when as a sculpture community, hands, minds and hearts work as one for the best possible individual and collective exhibition outcome.
Just as preparations have been made, workshop time structured, and plans finalised for this intensive making period, a global curve ball appears and everything changes. The physical, the material, the spaces we work in and our learning community are now places of danger. The things that sustain us, make our hearts beat with excitement are now risks we are unable to mitigate against.
We must reset, rethink and remake for a very different environment. We must use our agility, creativity and innovation to create an online public exhibition for a virtual audience that showcases the vision of the making and planning process of degree show artworks.
We mourn what we were unable to do together in physical space but utterly celebrate the wonderful collection of individual works and representations of process that populate this online exhibition. They have been achieved through student creativity, tenacity and the willingness to take on a tough challenge at a tough time.
In the end often it is how we deal with difficulty that shows us what we are made of. The sculpture staff team are extremely proud of the 2020 Fine Art: Sculpture student year group who have produced such extraordinary work for extraordinary times.
We salute you and feel privileged to have been a part of your three year creative journey.
Suzanne Hutchinson
Fine Art: Sculpture Course Leader.
Ole Hagen
Fine Art: Sculpture Level 6 Tutor.
How to apply for this course