Last month our Art and Design (with a foundation year) students organised, curated and installed their own exhibition.
“Rituals” was a selection of work by our Foundation artists exploring what a ritual meant to them, on display for the wider University community to experience.
Evie Brown made a piece inspired by her ritual of checking the room for spiders each night.
“I really struggled with what I wanted to do and going back and forth as we did a book binding workshop a little bit before and I was so excited, I just wanted to do it immediately, but it didn’t really fit. The thing that gave me the idea was playing around with the ripped paper and layered glass art, I thought that’s pretty cool.”
Jamie Harris created an acrylic on canvas piece with a foam relief, inspired by their experiences growing up in the USA. “This piece was made to represent my perspective of people in the church, but also their perspective of me.”
Jamie added that curating the exhibition made them think about time management and placement “Choosing the pieces to go into it was the longest process. For this project, we had 4 weeks and it felt like the first 3 weeks was thinking just about what do you want to put into the exhibition. So it was thinking about how do you hang it, if you were doing something out of solid wood, how would you hang that for example.”
Jamie also took a prominent role in the organisation of the exhibit as a whole.
The next exhibition that the Foundation artists will contribute to is the Degree Show this Summer. Looking forward to the Degree Show, Evie commented on how her experience with “Rituals” has helped her to plan her preparations.
“I think it’s good knowing how it will work a little bit more. How things will be structured and how to prepare. It will be a little bit less intimidating.”
Art and Design (with a foundation year) at Staffs Uni is a year of creative exploration that exposes students to all of the possibilities within the Art and Design department. Student artists are encouraged to test techniques, to find their voice and define their specialism.
It's perfect for those still exploring their creative specialisms, or for those looking to take their first steps into Art and Design. Students progress from the foundation year into a range of BA & BArch (Hons) specialisms with confidence. You can explore the range of Art and Design courses here.