This year's Graduate Show is impressive in its scale and creativity
15 Aug 2013
Lucy Newbould by Andy Weekes
The Faculty of Arts annual Graduate Show attracts around 15,000 visitors each year to see and experience a large body of creative work by more than 500 final-year students.
This year’s ‘Up and Beyond’ show represents an incredibly broad range of creative expression with everything from the design of a scarf or a teacup to large-scale urban architecture projects.
The installations in the Fine Art Sculpture studio always draw a lot of visitors and this year is no exception. Fine Art Sculpture student Lucy Newbould creates a sensory sculpture “Clam Puppet”, a red velvet stage curtain showing two brass instruments on cushions. Lucy who is considering a career in art therapy said: “My exhibit is interactive and involves participants on both sides of the curtain gaining different perspectives.”
Ceramics by Stephanie Holmes won The Maria Desogus Memorial Award Prize in recognition of innovation and creativity within design and craft. Her work is based on the theme of freedom and imprisonment and her teacups feature symbolic patterns of walls and windows with keys for handles.
Fine Art painting student Ed Liddle, who won the Seoul National University, Korea Award, depicts fragments of imagery in his work combining limbs with pieces of wallpaper. He said: “These fragments combined, forced together, further develop a desire to bring together disparate elements of my own visual language.”
Architecture BA(Hons) student Jessica Lyons won first prize in the Morgan Carn Design Excellence in Architecture and Interior Architecture Award for her work on the brief ‘Defending Dover’. Jessica’s project ‘Best of British Beef’ examined ways of bringing the town’s ruined Western Heights Fortifications back into use through the creation of an urban farming community set against the context of Dover’s historic significance as a former military frontier and gateway to the UK.
In Photography BA(Hons), a series of striking, close-up, head and shoulders portraits by Olivia Poppy Coles won her a Santander Award for Excellence and Achievement in Art and Design.
Ed Fiddes, Design and Craft BA(Hons) has combined bird boxes with signposts. He says: “The idea is to encourage people to be more aware of the wildlife around them. Birds nest in unusual places sometimes – even in traffic lights – so I’d like to think they’d use the sign post boxes.”
Ed Fiddes by Andy Weekes
Emily Rose Potter, who also studied Textile Design BA(Hons), came up with a range of colourful men’s collars. She said: “They are based on the old style detachable collars that men used to wear – men’s tailoring today is much more extrovert.”
There were a number of awards in Performance and Visual Art this year with a Seoul National University, Korea Award BA(Hons) Award going to Balint Revesc’s 26 min documentary film entitled ‘It’s worth listening to your Gran’. The film follows a journey of discovery by three young filmmakers’ as they explore their grandmothers’ pasts as, a British spy, German dancer and Hungarian Jew and the choices they made in their youth. The conclusion focussed on the question: “How willing are we to learn from the past?”
The 'Up and Beyond' show continues until Thursday 14 June, 2012. See the full list of our 2012 prize winners.
