The Venice Fellowships – Falmouth Partnership with the British Council

Venice Art Biennale 2017, Alicja Kwade – photo: Richard Christensen

Falmouth School of Art at Falmouth University is delighted for the third year to be a partner in the British Council’s Venice Fellowships. The programme is a unique opportunity for students, graduates and researchers to spend a month in Venice during the world’s most important art and architecture biennales. Working with others on invigilation and developing their own study and research, graduates receive an excellent grounding in engaging a professional, public and international audience with the British Pavilion, and develop teamwork, leadership and networking skills.

We will shortly be inviting our final year BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Drawing students to apply for a funded month-long Fellowship at the 2019 Art Biennale. Meanwhile, 2018 BA(Hons) Drawing graduate Hannah Berrisford has recently arrived at the Architecture Biennale for her month-long Fellowship, alongside others from disciplines including fine art, architecture, design, curation and anthropology. We look forward to hearing more about Hannah’s experience on her return, and asked her about applying and preparing for this opportunity…

“The Venice Fellowship is an opportunity to live in Venice for a month, working alongside the British Council, invigilating at “la biennale de venezia” and spending free time exploring the city, developing your practice within your own personal project.

The application asked questions about why you felt you were suitable for the event, and how your personal experiences would aid you in your time out there. I was also asked what sort of work I wanted to produce in my own time, following their theme of “freespace”. I was a student of the Drawing degree, and had chosen watercolour as a medium to specialise in. I wanted to continue developing my skills as a painter in Venice, so I interpreted freespace as an investigation of the relationships between the buildings of Venice and light, and how that would translate in my watercolour paintings.  

Architecture Biennale 2018, British Pavilion, (c) British Council

Two of us on the Drawing degree were selected for an interview – there was no competitive atmosphere, only genuine “good luck”s. Because I am living in the South West of England, and the interviews were being hosted in London, the British Council were excellent and offered me a Skype interview. I had done quite a bit of research about past Biennales just in case they wanted to test if I had done any background research, but they themselves explained a brief history of the biennale, which was nice. It felt like they were wanting me to succeed in the interview and were very open. I responded to all their questions with similar answers to what I had included in my first application. I also mentioned how the themes I wanted to explore in Venice tied into my dissertation topic.

A mandatory induction involved two days in London, meeting other fellows and the groups we would be travelling with. I was placed in the final group to go to Venice – October 24th to November 26th. There are 10 of us in this group, and a significant age range and a diversity of artistic backgrounds. Even though we were all from an academic institute, everyone seemed to be studying a different branch of art varying from architecture to interpretive dance.

The weekend was centred around seminars that discussed the exhibition we would be invigilating. We were offered advice about finding accommodation and about interacting with the public. The groups got into teams and we met one another properly; it was during this time that people began sparking ideas about flat sharing/renting, as well as discussing individual research projects and when it might be appropriate to help one another. Another teammate and I have decided to flat share whilst we’re in Venice, staying close to another two teammates also flat sharing. This way, friendships will get a chance to grow, and as we’re all artists, we will have opportunities to bounce ideas off one another, helping our own projects develop.  

Even though I’m entering a biennale centred on Architecture, drawing and painting buildings is actually one of my weakest skills. I threw myself in at the deep end, to force myself to address this problem. I didn’t want to arrive in Venice and begin the project with zero architectural experience so, over the last month, I have been engaged with the “Inktober” challenge. To merge this challenge and my own personal project, I decided to relate each day’s title to an architectural theme. Forcing myself to create works like this every day has helped me feel a little more prepared for the work I’ll be creating during my time in Venice”.

2017 Fine Art graduate Abbie Hunt wrote a piece for us about her experience spending a month as a Fellow at the 2017 Art Biennale.

Drawing staff and students present at Symposium

Artist, drawing researcher and lecturer in BA(Hons) Drawing Dr Joe Graham, and some of his Falmouth School of Art students and alumni,  presented papers and workshops at The Embodied Experience of Drawing event at The Drawing Symposium, Plymouth.

The event responded to the increasing proportion of artists in the South West working in performative drawing practice. It gathered contributors, to acknowledge and interrogate this movement and to discuss ideas around the future of drawing research, philosophy and practice.

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Dr Joe Graham discussed his paper The Utility of Drawing: Drawn and Withdrawn.  “This paper sketches a nascent ontology of drawing, one that uses Heidegger to explore the idea that drawing is a fundamentally useful type of thing for those who draw. Within this understanding however, the utility of drawing appears withdrawn, so to speak. It requires being ‘drawn out’ (freed) when drawings are viewed for some purpose – as pictures, diagrams, maps, plans or other forms intended for use.”

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Image: Aleksandr Chotilovskij

Kayleigh Jayne Harris, a recent graduate from BA(Hons) Drawing at Falmouth University, primarily focused on the identity of line within contemporary drawing practices. Her paper  Drawing line through performance: does the drawing live as an immaterial trace, a material document, or both, through the experience of line? explored whether performative acts be identified as a form of drawing, through the acknowledgement and experience of the lines generated during and by gesture.

Bhuvaneshvari Pinto a current student of BA(Hons) Drawing and Ralph Nel (Alumni) presented a joint workshop Drawing as a Tool in Cultivating Awareness – A Workshop in Observational Drawing.  The workshop explored the idea that observational drawing nurtures mental stillness and sharpens our awareness of ourselves and our surroundings.

Video with kind permission of Stuart Bewsey

#StreetDraw24: What can you do in 24 hours?

BA(Hons) Illustration student Helen Trevaskis was among the organisers of StreetDraw24, a drawing initiative to raise awareness and money for homeless charity St. Petroc’s. So far, over £500 has been raised through donations. You can hear Helen talking to SourceFM the day after the event (Helen is introduced at 12:50)

Following the pilot event, Helen shares 24 things that this reportage fundraiser taught her and her fellow drawers about life in Falmouth, about staying up drawing for 24 hours, and about trying to do something good in the world through art.

1. A town is not one place. Using Falmouth as a reportage location across 24 hours showed us other sides of the town we live in…From the early morning workers busy while most of us are tucked up in bed, to the fitness fanatics using Jacob’s Ladder as their personal gym, to the late night car racers partying at Pendennis Point – the town has many sides.
2. Not sleeping sends you a bit weird. During the 24 hours some drawers went from being intensely focused to barely able to speak – let alone draw – to practically hysterical with laughter at the smallest thing, or continually hungry. Fascinating what sleep deprivation does to you!
3. Make it fun. Along the long walk from The Moor to Falmouth Cemetery via Pendennis, we played drawing games to get our energy up as midnight came and went. The results were not artistic masterpieces (or even a record of where we were, given we could barely see) but were one of the most memorable bits of the night.
4. Stay safe. Even though we live in a safe town, we ensured no one drew alone at night, and we kept touch with each other via a Messenger group.
5. Talk to people. During the 24 hours many interesting interactions occurred. One group, drawing on a housing estate, talked to an elderly couple who then fed them fruit. Another got #StreetDraw24 followed on Instagram by a creative agency in London after chatting to its founder. Many more revealed how many people are themselves artists in this town. Embrace such interactions – it’s one of the joys of location drawing.
6. Start. Many of us were not sure what to draw when we first got out on the street despite lots of great advice from reportage supremo Anna Cattermole’s blog, written for us in the run up to #StreetDraw24 (sorry Anna!). While it can be good to have a plan perhaps what’s more important is getting going, because once you do, drawing tends to have its own momentum.
7. Mix it up. Bringing variety into how you draw not just what you draw can help give you and your work energy, particularly as the hours tick by.
8. Be respectful. There was a point at about 1am Friday where five of us were drawing a camper van parked at Gyllygvase Beach, and realised someone was probably asleep inside! As we quietly snuck off, we imagined how weird it would have been for the occupants to find us all there, reminding us it’s important to be respectful in choosing our locations.
9. Keep repeating your message. #Streetdraw24 is designed to raise awareness about the problem of street homelessness in Cornwall, but it’s very easy for people to miss the point. So don’t be shy about repeating the why of what you’re doing, to get it across effectively, and then repeating it again.
   

   

   

   

   

   
10. Make it social. While drawing in pairs or a group is not something illustrators and artists normally do, even the least extrovert among us got lots out of drawing on location together.
11. Dogs are of the day cats of the night. This is just true.
12. Keep going. Whether you’re on location for four hours or 12 or 24, you’re not going to be in the mood the whole time and not everything you produce will be great; but we definitely saw work evolve across the 24 hours, because we just kept going.
13. Be shamelessly opportunist. Telling everyone you meet what you’re up to before, during and after an event like this is really valuable. Not just because they might want to get involved, but also because the story of what you’re doing is almost as important as the thing itself, and the more you tell it the better it will get.
14. Drawing from observation matters. If you’re involved in the arts, you should draw, because drawing is less about drawings and more about looking at, engaging with and absorbing what’s around you – a core artistic skill.
15. Collaboration is an important creative skill. This time around there were only a few people from beyond the BA Illustration course involved in StreetDraw24. It’s something we’ll shake up next time, because collaborating brings new ideas, perspectives and opportunities.
16. Wet wipes are your friend. Whether you’re using messy charcoal, find there are no open public toilets near where you’re drawing, or you’ve taken food to eat and are worried about where your hands have been; you’re going to need wet wipes during an event like this.
17. Be easy-going. This was a pilot, so for us it was important to have as few rules as possible, so people could invent what worked for them and we could learn.
18. Most people are really nice. They are. So talk to them.
    

    

    

    

    

    
19. Getting the money bit right is hard. #StreetDraw24 was designed as a fundraiser and fundraising is difficult but an event idea isn’t a good one if it doesn’t make money.
20. “The more you look the more you see”. So true.
21. Laughing helps warms you up. Also true but you still need a coat, thick socks and a hat if you’re out all night.
22. There are lots of ways to take part. While a small band of drawers took to the streets last week, many other people sent messages of support, donated to St Petroc’s, and ‘liked’ or commented on the images we posted. To us they were all part of the #StreetDraw24 team.
23. Feel lucky. There are many things those of us with homes to go to each night take for granted – like having a toilet when and where you want one. It’s important to remember this is not everyone’s reality and to remember how lucky we are.
24. Be ambitious. Next up will be an exhibition of #StreetDraw24 work – exhibition space kindly donated by the Poly– in early October. But we’ve bigger plans, too, so watch this space…

You can donate to the StreetDraw24 fundraising page, in aid of St. Petroc’s, and you can see more of the resulting work, and hear about future initiatives via the StreetDraw24 Facebook page.

StreetDraw24: Raising awareness of homelessness in Cornwall.

For 24 hours starting at noon on 23 August, a small band of students and other locals will be drawing from the streets of Falmouth to raise awareness of Cornwall’s homelessness problem, as part of the first ever StreetDraw24. Here, one of the organisers, BA(Hons) Illustration student Helen Trevaskis, talks about the motivation and intention for the initiative… 

StreetDraw24: How can art be a force for good?

‘While beyond the Tamar, Cornwall may conjure up thoughts of pasties and clotted cream, happy childhood holidays and Poldark’s semi-clad antics on horseback along a never-ending coastline, anyone who spends proper time here knows that parts of the county face many and serious social problems. One of these is homelessness, with some reports highlighting an increase of 52% in rough sleeping in the county between 2009 and 2016. While the arts may not seem an obvious place to look to for ways to bring focus onto this problem, that’s exactly what StreetDraw24 wants to do.

How? Well, the idea is simple. Over a 24 hour period, ending at noon on the 24th of the month, draw from the streets of your town, post images to social media using the tag #streetdraw24 and share a link for donations to a relevant homelessness charity. After the event, use the best 24 images – one for each hour of the day – to promote the issue of homelessness and fundraise further. Then…learn, grow, repeat!

This will be the first ever StreetDraw24 and has been organised by first year students from Falmouth’s BA(Hons) Illustration keen to feel connected to and active in the community they now live in. With an emphasis on learning by doing on a small scale, they’ve been promoting the event on Facebook and raising funds for St Petroc’s Society – a Truro based charity supporting the single homeless. Along the way advice on location based drawing, ‘reportage’, has been shared from Falmouth students and tutors alongside information on Cornwall’s homelessness problem.

Some of those taking part in the event will draw from the streets for the whole 24 hours to bring attention to the sad reality that for some the streets are their home 24/7. So, if you see a damp cold looking person drawing from the streets of Falmouth at the end of next week go and talk to them – they’ll love to share what they’re doing! Or even better – take part by checking out the StreetDraw24 Facebook page, donating to St Petroc’s Society or offering ideas for how to make the impact of this initiative even bigger’.

 

Recent Practice: Drawing Lecturer Dr Joe Graham

Joe Graham Lecturer on BA(Hons) Drawing was among the contributors to ACTS RE-ACTS,  an annual laboratory of performance, new media, workshops, lectures, discussions, events and installations.

This year Acts Re-Acts, at Wimbledon College of Art, took the form of an intensive two-day laboratory of selected performances, exploring the borderzone between Theatre and Fine Art.

Other contributors included: Eleanor Bowen & Jane Bailey, Henry Bradley, Greig Burgoyne, Angela Hodgson-Teall & Miles Coote, Richard Layzell & Bruce Barber, Jozefina Komporaly & ZU-UK & guests, Robert Luzar, Melanie Menard, Lucy O’Donnell, Ken Wilder & Aaron McPeake, Alex Reuben, Lois Rowe & The Haptic Collective, Aminder Virdee.

 

Falmouth School of Art lecturer Joe Graham is ‘in conversation’ with artist Lucy O’Donnell, March 2018.

Drawing and Fine Art alumni present new work

Alumni Theo Crutchley-Mack and Sam Wood have announced a joint exhibition showing new work based in and around Falmouth town.

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In recent months, both artists have been working on small en plein air paintings, used to develop more sustained works, all of which will be exhibited at The Poly, Falmouth, from Tuesday 24 July (including private view on 24th 6-9pm).

Theo graduated from BA(Hons) Drawing, and Sam from BA(Hons) Fine Art, in 2015. Both have since pursued their art full time, with exhibition, prize and residency success.

Theo is currently based in West Wales; he has this year undertaken a 6 week period as Artist in Residence at the abandoned whale station in Grytviken, for the South Georgia Heritage Trust. Sam now lives and exhibits in Newcastle, so it’s great to be able to see work from both artists in Falmouth once again.

• https://samwoodart.format.com/ 
• https://www.crutchley-mack.com/
• www.facebook.com/crutchleymack
• instagram @crutchleymack
• instagram @likessam

Congratulations Class of 2018!!

Wow! What a fantastic degree show. After all the hard work and energy that went into the conversion of studios into exhibitions over the last month – not to mention the brilliant achievement of having created the work itself – we hope our final year students are recovering from the celebrations marking the culmination of their three years of degree study.

To mark the end of the year, Falmouth School of Art hosts an awards ceremony; a chance for third year students to come together with their peers and tutors to reflect and to celebrate one another, before joining wider friends and family for the official opening of their degree shows. The Awards recognise Outstanding Achievement, Studentship and Dissertation in all our subjects; announcement is also made of the recipients of a raft of residencies arranged by Falmouth School of Art with external partners, to provide graduating students with further opportunities to test their work in public contexts and to network with other artists.

Thank you to all our students and tutors for making this such a celebratory occasion, and we hope you all enjoyed your evening and one another’s exhibitions as much as we did.

Here we share with you some scenes from our end of year awards and the degree shows opening – thank you for your support this year.

(Class of 2018 – please get in touch if you want a high-res version of your photo).

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The Drawn Exchange: A collaborative project

Alice Howard and Georgia Hunt

Falmouth School of Art student Alice Howard collaborated with her good friend and BA Photography student Georgia Hunt in the development of The Drawn Exchange, an art group involving residents at Abbeyfield Residential Home in Falmouth.

Georgia, a final year student of BA(Hons) Photography, had wanted to develop a photography workshop with residents after she discovered that some were creating beautiful artistic work in the privacy of their bedrooms. Georgia described as an immense privilege the access she gained to the private world of this community, but her plans soon broadened. She says, ‘The initial plan to begin a photography workshop was scuppered as I saw a greater need to encourage drawing, the most basic yet fundamental form of seeing. The purpose then shifted to center on relationship, the relationships between the residents and their relationship with drawing’. It was here that Alice became involved. A 3rd year student on BA(Hons) Drawing, Alice brought a love of literature and a foundational understanding of drawing, which underpinned the art group model, based on emotional awareness and creative freedom. Similar to the practice of Art Therapy, the emphasis lay in the process of making art. The success was in the quality of relationship as opposed to the final outcomes. The Drawn Exchange was born.

Each week the group got together around the living room table, with materials selected by the residents. The sessions began with an exercise to engage the emotional mind, to invite and express the unseen and then – responding to how they felt – they began to draw. Sometimes they worked with their non-dominant hand to activate the right hemisphere of the brain, to stimulate emotions, to open up a channel for feeling and to encourage emphasis away from the visual aesthetics of the drawing. Georgia says, ‘I think of it as preparing the ground  for further art making to occur, yet it was often the most profound. There is a raw and unknown quality that emerged through the drawings’.

The art group worked predominately from imagination and memory and the residents communicated their internal world, bringing a shift from emotional to physical. Georgia says, ‘The magic of drawing is that it has the capacity to bring to life those fading fragments of memory, unfolding like silent stories on paper’.

Alice introduced poetry into the group, to act as a catalyst for sparking memories and understanding feelings, which could then feed into drawings. Alice says, ‘In a number of sessions, we did collaborative drawings between two people. Starting from a poem enabled the drawer to delve deeper into their emotions sparked by that poem. The collaborative aspect meant that as the paper was turned and we each worked into the other’s drawing, it was no longer about responding to the poem but to the other persons drawing’. The drawing became a form of exchange.

The culmination of the project was a showcase of the work made and curated by the Abbeyfield Art Group.  The exhibition was shown in the communal areas at the Abbeyfield Residential home to the joy and acclaim of residents, students, and visitors. Georgia and Alice intend to explore the possibilities of continuing elsewhere the model they have developed here in Falmouth, following their graduation this summer.

 

Falmouth School of Art Lecturers selected for John Moores Painting Prize 2018

Virginia Verran, Associate Lecturer on BA(Hons) Fine Art and Peter Matthews, Visiting Lecturer on BA(Hons) Drawing, have been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2018.

This year the John Moores Painting Prize is celebrating 60 years. Named after sponsor Sir John Moores (1896-1993), it is the UK’s best-known painting competition, and culminates in an exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery every two years, forming a key strand of the Liverpool Biennial.

The John Moores exhibition is held in partnership with the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition Trust, and showcases some of the best contemporary painters from across the UK.

Sir Peter Blake became the first Patron of the Prize in 2011 and says, “The John Moores is one of the most prestigious art competitions in the UK and winning the Junior Prize in 1961 is one of the achievements of which I am most proud.”

Virginia Verran – current work at her studio in Bethnal Green, London.

 

 

Peter Matthews  is a Visiting Lecturer on our BA(Hons) Drawing. Of his success this year he says, “Really delighted to be showing a large scale painting at the 60th John Moores Painting Prize”.

 

Virginia Verran was born in Falmouth and has taught Fine Art since 1990. She is an Associate Lecturer on Falmouth’s BA(Hons) Fine Art course, and also teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design. In 2010 she won the Jerwood Drawing Prize and this year her entry in the 2018 John Moores Painting Prize is titled ‘Black Star’; a large piece measuring 6ft x 5ft6ins.  She lives in London and works in her studio in Bethnal Green.

 

 

Coming Soon…Falmouth School of Art Degree Shows

The studios are cleared, third years have moved in with paint, tools and the labours of their final year and are already transforming the spaces into what promises to be a diverse and vibrant degree show from Falmouth School of Art this year.

Students of BA(Hons) Drawing, BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Illustration will open their shows to the public on Friday 25 May, including a launch that evening, 6-9pm, all welcome. As well as final degree work from our third years, separate exhibitions will showcase work from our first and second year BA(Hons) Illustration and BA(Hons) Drawing students.

The shows will be open as follows:

• Friday 25 May, 10-4pm
• Friday 25 May 6-9pm exhibition launch, all welcome
• Saturday 26 May 10-4pm
• Sunday 27 May 10-4pm
• Monday 28 May (bank holiday) 10-4pm
• Tuesday 29 May 10-4pm
• Wednesday 30 May 10-4pm

Get the dates in your diaries and we’ll see you in three weeks!

For details of all Falmouth University summer shows, see the website.

Falmouth School of Art Drawing Forum 2018

The Falmouth School of Art Drawing Forum 2018 posed the question ‘What Does Drawing Do?’

It has been a long established assumption that drawing underpins most disciplines within the creative sector, but what drawing does, and how it functions for different practitioners, is probably an ever-changing and essential component.

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By asking a series of speakers to talk about what drawing does for them, this forum hoped to develop a better understanding of the possibilities and functions of drawing. As well as Falmouth-based researchers, the event welcomed guest speakers of national and international standing, including:

Storyboard Artist Jay Clarke worked on the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit & the Curse of the WereRabbit and other projects with Aardman and was lead storyboard artist for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which won Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Production Design. He is currently storyboarding Universal’s The Voyage of Dr Dolittle and creating an illustrated children’s novel.

Multi-disciplinary artist Solveig Settemsdal lives and works in London and Bristol; she won the Jerwood Drawing Prize for her video work Singularity in 2016.

Ed Eva and George Baldwin formed the drawing research partnership eegb after graduating from Falmouth’s BA(Hons) Drawing in 2014. eegb’s practice lies at the intersection of drawing and technology; they build machines that draw, have been awarded a number of residencies and grants and have exhibited in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the USA.

This video shares sections of the eight short talks on how drawing is used in contemporary creative practice:

 

 

 

BA(Hons) Drawing Students: Field Trip to Coverack

Artist Peter Mathews joined a group of BA Hons Drawing students for a three day field trip to Coverack in early March.

Photo: Emma Edwoods

Coverack is a small fishing village on the south coast of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall and is surrounded by a geologically rich and diverse coastline. The village provided the perfect location for a series of drawings that responded to the dramatically changing weather that the students experienced during their stay – including warm sunshine that glistened off the water to huge crashing waves that gave everyone a good soaking.

The students had exclusive use of the local youth hostel which proved to be a welcome sanctuary to eat and shelter together, discussing and sharing their work and experience with Peter and their resident tutors.

Photo: Emma Edwoods

 

As the wind gusted in off the sea outside the hostel windows, evenings were spent cooking together, eating a lot, playing games, and even more drawing.

All photos by Emma Edwoods

 

#IWD2018 – Thank you to these inspirational artists

On International Women’s Day 2018, a big thank you to these artists who have inspired our students by visiting us in Falmouth to talk about their practice as part of the Falmouth School of Art Guest Speaker Programme.

White out!

Snow has brought much to a standstill here in Falmouth…Our campuses are currently closed, no teaching is taking place today. Snow on this scale is very unusual for Cornwall, so a bit of an event. With routes leading to our campuses treacherous with ice and compacted snow and buses stopping service due to road conditions, our staff and student safety means business as usual isn’t possible today. However…snow shots from yesterday!…

Photo by Sami Saunders (pictured, from BA Drawing, l-r, Abigail Saunders, William Trewartha-Jones, Charlotte Jones, Meg Fatharly, Bryony Kemp and Constança Sardinha)

BA Drawing students, constructing

Eek!

Falmouth Campus drive – possibly the clearest path in Falmouth!

Visitor to the Printmaking Studios

Magical Belmont Gardens

Cornish palms strangely suit a snow covering.

 

 

Shelterbox exhibition by BA(Hons) Drawing Students

BA(Hons) Drawing students from all years are exhibiting work during February and March in the Shelterbox Visitor Centre, Truro.

Course Coordinator & Senior lecturer Isolde Pullum says, ‘The students were very moved by their recent visit to Shelterbox. I think it really hit home to many of them the importance of an immediate response to an emergency situation. The idea to make drawings that could raise money came from them, and the theme of Temporary Housing seemed broad enough to encompass a range of different approaches and ideas.’

‘Also in the exhibition are The History Box drawings, which aim to capture the passage of time by including elements of change and movement within the same drawing. A drawing, unlike a photograph, has the potential to encompass time passing by the artist’s reaction to changes. The staff and students really welcome this opportunity to work with Shelterbox and hope it can be the start an ongoing relationship.’

 

All the drawings on display can be bought, some for as little as £10 each, with all the proceeds going to ShelterBox.  Visitor Experience Assistant Ellie Howell-Round says, ‘This is very generous of the Drawing students, and the artworks are fascinating and thought-provoking. Everyone can empathise with the people that ShelterBox helps, as we all fear extreme weather and appreciate the importance of safety and shelter.’

First Year BA(Hons) Drawing – A Pop Up Exhibition.

The first year BA(Hons) Drawing students transformed their studio to create a pop up exhibition, curated by John Howard, Associate Lecturer. The exhibition was held in the drawing studios and featured over 100 drawings from the students’ first term of work and covered a wide range of subjects and artistic techniques.

The students worked together to prepare the space for the exhibition. First year student Maria Meekings felt that this process shifted the collective vision from viewing their work as practice pieces, to viewing the pieces in their own right and she was excited to get feedback on her work. “Being able to present work to fellow practitioners and the wider public is gratifying in that it helps you understand that as an artist you are part of a community and that your work exists in a context of both other pieces of art and as something which others can take pleasure or interest in, and not merely as art for its own sake.”

The exhibition also prompted discussion among the students about what they had learnt during this first term of immersion, their response to each-others’ pieces and the aspects of the course that they had most enjoyed so far. Maria says “Being able to explore a variety of techniques and viewpoints has been quite fascinating and useful I feel to understand myself as an artist and the work I want to produce. I think that the understanding in many ways is just as important as the work I’ve produced, if not more, as that is part of my future while each piece finished is automatically assigned to my past.

Reflecting on the process of drawing, Senior Lecturer Peter Skerrett considers that it can be a very introspective activity. “Having the opportunity to share this practice with a wider audience enables the students to see their work from a critical distance, almost like encountering it for the first time. This increases their ability to understand their own and their colleagues work from a more critical and reflective viewpoint.”

Isolde Pullum, Course Coordinator for BA(Hons) Drawing, was impressed with the students’ professional manner and the way in which they worked together to put the show up in a very short space of time. She was also delighted with the quality of the drawings produced so early in the course, during which time they have created work on location during study visits to Tresco on the Isles of Scilly, The National Trust’s Trelissick, Trebah Garden and Paradise Park wildlife sanctuary. They also visited ShelterBox in Truro to prepare for an upcoming project for next term.

There will be more opportunities for the students to develop their professional practice and to exhibit their work, as future exhibitions are planned for the Fox Café on the Falmouth Campus.

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‘An Hour to Sing – A Journey of Following’

An Hour to Sing – A Journey of Following by Kym Martindale and Caroline Blythe, is a collaboration featuring drawing and writing, published in Edition Three of Elementum Journal.

Images of ‘An Hour to Sing – a Journey of Following’ by Kym Martindale and Caroline Blythe from Edition three of Elementum Journal

Caroline Blythe, a recent BA(Hons) Drawing graduate of Falmouth School of Art, and Dr. Kym Martindale, Senior Lecturer in Falmouth’s School of Writing and Journalism have, over the last three years, been collaborating on a project that has sought to explore and respond to Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, an account of a bicycle ride from Guildford to Somerset in 1913.

Between 2012 and 2017, poet and cyclist Kym Martindale began the pursuit of Edward Thomas, riding and writing parts of Thomas’s journey from Winchester to the Quantocks in Somerset. In 2014, Caroline Blythe joined in, equipped with OS maps, and a copy of In Pursuit of Spring, and set off to explore and discover the landscape and locations described in poetry and prose by Martindale and Thomas.

For practical reasons both Kym and Caroline split Thomas’ journey into three distinct areas, visiting these when time allowed, following Thomas on bicycle, foot and at times by car. They recorded snippets of time and place ­– observing and notating the landscape as they travelled. The result is a collection of poems by Dr Kym Martindale and drawings by Caroline Blythe recently published in Edition Three of Elementum Journal.

Images of ‘An Hour to Sing – a Journey of Following’ by Kym Martindale and Caroline Blythe from Edition three of Elementum Journal

We talked with Caroline and Kym to find out more…

Caroline says, “It has been an absolute pleasure to discover and explore both the countryside in the south of England, described so beautifully by Edward Thomas, and also respond to and work with Kym’s wonderful poems, while at the same time recording my own visual observations. As I travelled through the locations described by Edward Thomas and Kym, capturing fleeting moments in sketchbooks, I kept thanking them for introducing me to these beautiful and interesting places. It was a privilege to experience the landscape through their eyes as well as observe for myself. It was a fascinating process. Perhaps the most exciting visual outcomes from this project evolved through this collaborative working process which led to the creation and compiling of palimpsests – an interleaving of tracings of drawings.”

Kym adds, “This research project combined two great passions of mine, poetry and cycling. In Pursuit of Spring describes a landscape on the brink of change, but it is the cradle too of so much of Thomas’s poetry, and an index to the man himself. The poems and drawings are ‘re/tracings’ of journeys made by Thomas, then myself, then Caroline, through a landscape that is constantly changing economically, politically, and aesthetically. And about halfway through the project, we suddenly realised that although we each travelled alone, we were also together in the journey we were making. I am sorry in some measure, that we have arrived.”

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Elementum, founded by Falmouth MA graduate Jay Armstrong, is a biannual publication of new writing and visual arts that explores the natural world and our role within it. Through folklore, literature, poetry, science and specially commissioned art and photography, Elementum quietly brings the reader back to what really matters by nurturing our connection to the natural world and the myths that surround it. The theme of the third edition is ‘roots’ and explores our origins and what sustains us.

If you would like to know more about Elementum journal or purchase a copy of the publication, you can do so by visiting their website: https://www.elementumjournal.com/

Student exhibition responds to Venice Biennale…

BA(Hons) Drawing and BA(Hons) Fine Art students recently returned from a study visit together to the Venice Biennale, and responded by creating a student-led pop-up exhibition in the attic of Falmouth Campus’s Belmont Studios. Work included drawing, painting, print, photography, sculpture and installation.

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Highlights of a visit to the Venice Biennale

 

Venice Biennale, Hew Locke – photo: Richard Christensen

BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Drawing students recently returned from a study visit to the Venice Biennale.

The visit gave students from the two courses an opportunity to spend time with those on a different course at Falmouth, and the group fit much into their time. 2017 graduate Abbie Hunt, who was supported by Falmouth School of Art and the British Council to undertake a British Council Venice Fellowship, had been in touch with the students to make recommendations based on her experience of working at the Biennale for a month. And exhibiting in this year’s  Diaspora Pavilion were Falmouth Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke and fellow Falmouth alumna Libita Clayton.

BA(Hons) Fine Art student Richard Christensen provided his response to some of the highlights, and some great images of the visit:

Venice Arsenale, photo: Richard Christensen

‘Our arrival in Venice was inauspicious, late on Monday evening with a biting wind which made for an uncomfortable ride in the vaporetto to San Marco.  The wind continued into Tuesday, together with plenty of rain, and found its way into the exhibition spaces of the Arsenale, where there were few warm spots for retreat.  But by Wednesday the wind had gone, and for the rest of our stay the city was pleasantly autumnal.

Much of the Arsenale site consists of a long series of halls which must once have been the dockyard workshops.  The exhibitions here were organised into loosely defined themes (‘the Common’, ‘the Earth’, etc)…the openness of the themed pavilions created both variety and dynamism, with a multitude of thought-provoking and visually arresting works in all media.

Venice, British Pavilion, Phyllida Barlow – photo: Richard Christensen

The British pavilion had a painting-sculptural installation by Phyllida Barlow called ‘folly’.  Energetic, exuberant, more than filling its space and spilling outside the building, it was certainly not lacking in ambition.

An area of undoubted strength at the Biennale was the consistently high standard of video art.  Video is now clearly in an age of maturity, with professional production values and themes which speak to their audiences with clarity.  Several works at Venice are operating at the boundary with cinema in terms of the scope of their ambition and their technical standards.

Although there was little live performance art at the Biennale, the one piece which I saw was remarkable for its power and intensity.  The German pavilion was an almost empty space apart from a raised glass floor and glass panels separating some of the rooms.  The audience, on entering the building, hardly knew what to expect.  The four performers, initially positioned around the main exhibition hall, moved together and then separated in successive bursts of energy and slow deliberation, in a loosely structured narrative of encounters and separations.

Venice, German Pavilion, photo: Richard Christensen

At times there was intimacy, at others the threat of violence.  Even though much of the performance took place in and among the audience, at no time was there any interaction with it.  And despite the intensity of the piece the expressions of the performers were impassive throughout – indeed, this impassivity was what gave it much of its power.  And at the end, when the four performers disappeared, their wordless drama, maintained over an hour and a quarter, left the audience exhausted by what they had seen and experienced.

Two and a half days in Venice could never provide much more than a taster of what the Biennale had to offer.  I could easily have spent a whole week or more there taking in the art.  And as for the city… I’m sure I could devote a whole year there just to exploring its endless maze of alleyways and canals.’

 

The Venice study visit is one of a number of optional overseas trips offered to undergraduate students of Falmouth School of Art during their studies. BA(Hons) Drawing have also in recent years visited Amsterdam, and BA(Hons) Fine Art have previously visited Berlin.

Artist Peter Matthews visits BA(Hons) Drawing

Artist Peter Matthews visited BA(Hons) Drawing in October to give a talk about his work and run a two-day Experiential Drawing workshop with first year students. Peter makes work in the oceans, but the drawing students found interest in the shoreline and shallow waters off Gyllyngvase Beach.

BA(Hons) Drawing on Tresco

First year students from BA(Hons) Drawing enjoyed a memorable week on Tresco, Isles of Scilly, as guests of Lucy and Robert Dorrien-Smith. 

The week started with Hurricane Ophelia and ended with Storm Brian, so air and sea travel was exciting. The students made drawings in the Abbey Gardens, did a project in the Five Islands School and enjoyed the hospitality of Gallery Tresco at the private view of Drawing Show, an exhibition of work by Falmouth BA(Hons) Drawing students who have previously visited the Island. You can view the brochure for Drawing Show online here.

Once again the magic of Scilly was inspirational, and students can’t wait to return.

A Gallery of drawings produced by BA(Hons) Drawing students at the North Cornwall Book Festival

Here’s a selection of drawings produced by BA(Hons) Drawing students at the North Cornwall Book Festival as part of their recent study visit:

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Off to Venice!…

Falmouth School of Art has regularly made the Venice Biennale a study visit destination. This week a group of students from BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Drawing are travelling together to spend four days at the 57th Biennale, staying in the heart of the city…

Folly, by Phyllida Barlow at the British Pavilion, Venice, 2017. Photo: Ruth Clark © British Council. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Falmouth has other connections at this year’s event – our Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke and fellow Falmouth alumna Libita Clayton are both exhibiting work at this year’s Diaspora Pavilion.

2017 Falmouth graduate Abbie Hunt, who was supported by Falmouth School of Art and the British Council to undertake a British Council Venice Fellowship, has been in touch with current students to make recommendations to the group, based on her experience of working at the Biennale for a month.

The Venice study visit is one of a number of optional overseas trips offered to undergraduate students of Falmouth School of Art during their studies. BA(Hons) Drawing have also in recent years visited Amsterdam, and BA(Hons) Fine Art have previously visited Berlin.

BA(Hons) Drawing Students enjoy study visit to North Cornwall Book Festival

A group of students over all three years of BA(Hons) Drawing enjoyed a two day study visit to the North Cornwall Book Festival last month.

 

Drawing students were invited to attend to record the event by making a series of drawings exhibited live as the event unfolded. Following the event these drawings were also exhibited on the event organisers digital platforms.

The Festival, now in its fifth year, is a wonderful four days of literature, music and workshops and takes place in the unique setting of St Endellion on the beautiful North Cornwall coast.

Artist Christina Mackie talks at Falmouth

Falmouth School of Art’s Guest Speaker Programme brings significant practitioners to Falmouth to give talks to our students about their practice. Final year BA(Hons) Drawing student Megan Fatharly gives a personal response to a recent talk by Guest Speaker Christina Mackie:

‘Multi-faceted artist Christina Mackie spoke to Falmouth School of Art students about her visual language, the depth she goes to to explore materials, how they interact with each other what this can encourage within a viewer.

The themes that ultimately prevail within Mackie’s work are colour and perception; this is evident in the work she did with Tate in 2015, in which artists worked with nets dipped in semi-crystalised dye and suspended to create a stark installation piece. As part of her talk, Mackie showed generated videos and plans of how that exhibition was put together.

As well as discussing this installation, Mackie also spoke about other works: on paper, photographs and how she works with objects to manipulate their purpose and form. I found this conversation between the layers of her work really engaging. Artists who are not afraid to work within more than one avenue show how important it is to do so, because it encourages these dialogues to be had and shows younger artists it’s a thing to be embraced.’

First look at this autumn’s Guest Speaker programme…

This autumn we welcome five outstanding Guest Speakers to deliver lectures to students of Falmouth School of Art. Speakers include return visits from our two Visiting Professors, and an exciting event in association with the Groundwork project. Places are available at each for members of the public, our arts partners across the region and our alumni.

Places limited, registration required. Click here for more details and links to registration.

FOMO – Introducing Falmouth’s first Art Publishing Fair

F O M O – the first ever Falmouth Art Publishing Fair – opens at 4pm on Friday 29 September for a weekend of talks, workshops, screenings, artists’ book works, performances, zines and comics and readings.   

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Organised by Falmouth School of Art’s Senior Lecturers Neil Chapman, Gillian Wylde and Carolyn Shapiro and Associate Lecturer Maria Christoforidou, F O M O will take place at Falmouth Art Gallery and the Library of the Municipal Buildings, The Moor, Falmouth, and brings together Falmouth School of Art staff and students with local participating institutions including: Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth Library, Tate St Ives, Stranger Collective, Urbanomic, Atlantic Press, Burning House Books, BLNT Collective, Keiken and Krowji. 

F O M O will include contributions from academic and research colleagues from: Royal  Holloway University, Cambridge University, West Dean College, Aarhus University, Plymouth University, Goldsmiths University of London, Research Center for Material Culture Netherlands and from across Departments at Falmouth University.

Generously supported by Falmouth Art Gallery, the event has grown out of discussion between colleagues across different departments at Falmouth University. From meetings as a Research Forum, finding common ground between their varied interests, the group started to consider joint research and how best to team up for that work. One of the organisers, Neil Chapman, reflects on the development of the event, and what we can look forward to over the weekend…

‘As a research group, we share a commitment to collective work. That’s both a pragmatic interest and a critical position too. Most often, when people work together it’s so that a workload can be shared. But collective work is unpredictable and inefficient too and these are values that might tend to be lost in the current climate. There is a lot of emphasis in the contemporary workplace on individuals’ success and the competition that results can be destructive. Our title for the event – Fear of Missing Out – is on some level an ironic allusion to these issues.

We are all of us, in different ways, committed to discursive work, to the climate of ideas that surrounds ‘making’ in our different disciplines. And that’s a foundation for the publication fair too, reflected in the many talks, screenings, readings and performances scheduled over the weekend. F O M O provides an opportunity for us to invite our colleagues and friends to Cornwall. It’s good for the cultures of creative practice here in Falmouth. F O M O will bring lots of people into contact who might not have met otherwise. We’re excited to imagine the new partnerships and the new work that might result.

The aim has been to inaugurate the kind of event that we would want to go to ourselves, also the kind of event that students would be excited about. Henrietta Boex, Director of Falmouth Art Gallery, has been extremely supportive. We’ve made all kinds of demands on her and she seems never to say no to anything; the Gallery’s Glyn Winchester has also been a great support. The independence of the project is a way of underscoring our own priorities, which are evident in all kinds of ways through the framing of the event: the name, the graphics, the publicity, the choice of which artists, writers and publishers to invite. There are many Art Publishing Fairs in the UK and abroad and we have had an eye on some of those. But in another sense this Fair has been invented from scratch. And for that reason it will work well as a foundation for bigger and more varied research initiatives to come. We’re talking about a future peer-reviewed journal, discursive gatherings – dream dinner date/fantasy football team type things with exciting living people—maybe some dead folk too, ghosts. No zombies. Digital Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida . . .

It’s particularly good to be working with current students and recent Falmouth University graduates. As part of FOMO, Graham Taylor who studied Fine Art and who graduated in 2015 is curating an exhibition entitled Practically Outside, involving a dozen or more Falmouth alumni. His contribution makes a direct engagement with the FOMO ethos, looking critically at what it means to be an ‘emerging artist’, engaging in the most thoughtful way with different platforms of exhibition and print publication.’

F O M O also includes contributions from writers, artists, poets, publishers, activists, hackers, Falmouth University alumni and musicians both national and international.

F O M O is an inaugural event, bringing a new art research collective into being, which, over forthcoming months will stage events in different forms and at different locations, connecting diverse networks.

https://falmouthartpublishingfair.wordpress.com/

BA(Hons) Drawing Student Megan Fatharly exhibits in London Gallery This Week

Megan Fatharly, a BA(Hons) Drawing student going into her third year of study at Falmouth has been selected for Beside The Wave London’s very first ‘Open Summer Show’.

The Private View takes place on Thursday 20 July 6-8pm at Beside The Wave London, 41 Chalcot Road, Primrose Hill, NW1 8LS.  The exhibition will run until 09 September 2017.

The show has been organised to celebrate the second anniversary of their London gallery and aims to put a focus on the wealth of creativity on their doorstep as well as welcoming selected artists from across the UK with a mix of emerging and established names.

Beside The Wave – Open Summer Show

Catching up with last year’s summer Intensives participants

Falmouth School of Art is currently accepting applications for its summer Intensives – 5-day studio-based courses for artists and art educators. We’re always bowled over by feedback from participants at the end of their week with us, but we have just caught up with some of 2016’s participants to ask them to reflect on their experience nine months on…

Burgundys in project space – Gwenyth Fugard

Abstract Painting participant Gwenyth Fugard highlighted the benefit she had felt of being among a group of artists for the week, having worked alone for three years since graduating in Fine Art from Central St. Martins. She also experienced a development in her way of working, as a result of the environment and structure of the course: ‘Though my own practice does not respond to abstracting from life, I found the projects set were hugely beneficial. I was taken away from my usual methodologies and the studio spaces provided were fantastic [and] enabled new approaches and ideas to develop quite quickly’. After finishing the Intensive last summer, Gwyneth successfully applied for a place on an MA at City & Guilds London Arts School.

Oversized Raincoat, by Karina Barrett

Wales-based artist Karina Barrett, who took the Figure Painting course, similarly valued the experience of community that shaped the Intensive week: “I enjoyed working in a studio with other artists – something I have not done since graduating” Within that context, she recalls, ‘I found the tuition to be of the highest standard and incredibly informative. As a professional, working, painter, I gained a lot from the advice given to me by both Jesse [Leroy Smith] and Ashley [Hold]’. Figure Painting participants also commented that the opportunity to work from a model for whole week was something that they couldn’t easily replicate as part of their day to day routine.

Amanda Jackson chose the Abstract Painting Intensive in order to develop her mostly figurative practice in a more abstract direction, and the course made such an impression that she will be joining us again this year. She observes, ‘The course gave me many ideas and processes, through tuition, critique and lectures, to set this development in motion’. In addition to this, she too cites working alongside other artists as an important benefit to her: “…the great experience of spending a week with other artists, to explore my own ideas but have others’ input and critique and discuss work and network with artists, some of whom I am [still] in contact with via social media’.

Amanda has continued with her practice, and has found the influence of the Intensive staying with her in her work, “Almost a year on, I have continued the work started in Falmouth, enjoying pushing my work ever further into abstraction. I have found that since the course, my work is much looser; I spend more time developing the work through direct painting – that is, exploring ideas on the canvas and seeing where it might lead – rather than planning and replicating.

Her week at Falmouth has resonated in her subsequent studio practice, as well as in the work she has produced since last summer: ‘I am more focused on my work, spending longer in the studio, so the course has given me discipline as well as inspiration…The back drop of the garden and grounds at Falmouth, which was used as a starting point for abstract paintings on the course, has led to a body of work that will be shown this summer as part of Leigh Art Trail’s 20^th Anniversary show’.

For many, the Intensives have provided the opportunity to work differently than they would in their own home or studio environment, with learning and experiences that have lingered and resonated in their continued studio practice. For London-based Val Coumant, ‘[it] was exactly what it said on the label – intensive. I haven’t worked so hard since my Psychotherapy training in the 1980’s. Or with such absorption and excitement’. But for Val, ‘the greatest insight was how the pieces I liked best were fortuitous rather than planned. It was like the Zen story about learning to paint bamboo: you go and live in a bamboo grove, and watch the bamboo in spring, summer, autumn and winter; in the morning, at noon, in the evening and in the moonlight; in mist, rain snow and sunlight, year after year. And then you go away and forget about bamboo. That’s when the painting starts’.

2016 Intensives participants relax in the walled garden with a cream tea.

The lasting impact of the week of focused creative activity is something we hear repeatedly. Karina noted, ‘I find that the advice of my tutors still echoes in my head, while I work…along with the memories of a truly fantastic week’.

For more information or to make an application to Falmouth School of Art’s Intensives – this year offered in Abstract Painting, Figure Painting and Observational Drawing, see our website:

www.falmouth.ac.uk/fsaintensivesThe application deadline is 28 April.

BA(Hons) Drawing take Amsterdam!

BA(Hons) Drawing students recently returned from a study visit to Amsterdam. Second year student Esme Bone and Emma Edwoods share their experience of the trip…

‘We were given the opportunity to go on a study trip to Amsterdam with our course. We spent five days exploring the city and experiencing the culture. We had the chance to visit many of the art galleries that Amsterdam has to offer, including the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk, spending time in the galleries and museums drawing and taking inspiration from the artists and artefacts.

Our hostel was next to Vondelpark; this was a really great location, because we were walking distance from many of the attractions. It also made it really easy to go and explore on our own, knowing that we could get back in no time if we needed to. The area was beautiful and really easy to get around.

We spent our evenings getting food together as a course or in smaller groups – it was nice to get to know everyone a little better. If you are ever given this opportunity I would definitely recommend it – just watch out for the bikes!’

 

 

BA(Hons) Drawing Forum 23 February 2017

Falmouth Senior Lecturer Peter Skerrett and artist and Visiting Speaker Claude Heath (far right) discuss a structural drawing built by students

BA(Hons) Drawing invited artist Claude Heath to join students and staff in the studios, where several collaborative drawings took place during the day. Drawings made included two large narrative pieces responding to poet works about the refugee crisis and World War One, a three-dimensional root-system structure made from rolled paper, and a ‘remote’ life drawing class where the model was placed in another room from the students, testing recall and memory.

During the morning, drawing stopped as students and staff listened to a conversation between Claude Heath and BA(Hons) Drawing Lecturer Dr Joe Graham, in which they talked about the validity of drawing as a means of legal communication, using a drawing of the Apple iPad as an example.

Claude also gave a lecture to students and staff from across Falmouth School of Art. Many thanks to Claude Heath from all of us at Falmouth for a very enjoyable and successful day.

Students plan collaborative drawing

BA(Hons) Drawing Lecturer Joe Graham in ‘Variations’ – a project about drawing movement

Students and artist Claude Heath during the Drawing Forum 2017

Drawing Forum Guest Speaker Claude Heath and Falmouth Lecturer Joe Graham in conversation at the Drawing Forum

A welcome return to Falmouth for author and illustrator Posy Simmonds

Posy Simmonds, pictured at the launch of the Big Draw Weekend on October 22, 2010 in London (AFP Photo PETER MACDIARMID)

Posy Simmonds joins us at Falmouth School of Art on 1 March in the next of our Guest Speaker events. It’s a welcome return for Simmonds, an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University, and the author and illustrator of books for adults and children, including Literary Life, Tamara Drewe, Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, the film of which was nominated for an Oscar.

Tamara Drewe, (c) Posy Simmonds

Simmonds made her name with a series of weekly cartoon strips for the Guardian from 1977; her acclaimed graphic novels Gemma Bovery, and Tamara Drewe were both serialised in the paper before their publication as books, and both have since been adapted into successful feature films.

 

Simmonds’ style for adults gently satirises the English middle classes. Her books often feature a ‘doomed heroine’, much in the style of the 18th- and 19th-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.

Simmonds’ carreer as a children’s author began in 1987 with Fred, the tale of the death of a domestic tomcat who, to his owners, appeared to have done little more than eat and sleep all day, but who had in fact by night been pop superstar ‘Famous Fred’, adored by thousands of fans

Further reading / listening…

Listen to Posy Simmonds interviewed by Gil Roth in 2015

Posy Simmonds on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, from 2008

Read Tripwire interview with Posy Simmonds from 2008

Read an extensive Posy Simmonds profile from 2012

Posy Simmonds will be talking at Falmouth University on 1 March 2017, Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus, 5pm-6pm 

Click here to register (free, but required) through our Eventbrite page.

Recent projects – BA(Hons) Drawing

Recent observational projects for second-year BA(Hons) Drawing students have been developed around Falmouth Campus’s new Atrium, which houses cafe bar, canteen and social and studying spaces. The height and breadth of  this new architectural space have challenged the visual skills of these more experienced students.

Cara Edlin Winterflood drawing Falmouth Campus’s Atrium

Esme Bone drawing Falmouth Campus’s Atrium

Meanwhile back in the Drawing studios, the ancient traditions of sight-sizing are being taught, raising the bar in terms of observational precision. These drawing classes, found daunting by students to begin with, proved hugely rewarding. Head of Drawing, Phil Naylor, commented, ‘Students describe a real sense of achievement in completing these classic exercises’.

Alice Howard and Sarah Standen sight-sizing

Student Samiir Saunders said, ‘Sight size drawing surprised me in its specificity. The particular nature of the measuring process definitely brought with it a lot of history and intrigue. However, it also demanded a huge amount of patience. My favourite phase in the process was at the completion of the first stage. The drawing appeared to be nothing more than a set of horizontal and vertical lines. And yet, contained within these lines were hours of precise measuring, mapping, checking and re-measuring – such that they evoked in me a vivid image of the completed work. This superposition of realism and abstraction was truly profound and humbling’.

(c) Samiir Saunders, sight size drawing

(c) Samiir Saunders, sight size drawing

(c) Samiir Saunders, sight size drawing

(c) Samiir Saunders, sight size drawing

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BA(Hons) Drawing first year Tresco study visit

First year BA(Hons) Drawing students braved the Atlantic swells for what has become an annual study trip on the Island of Tresco, Isles of Scilly. Students made studies in the island’s micro-environments, from the sub-tropical Abbey Garden to the weather-blitzed moors of the North End.

This experience immersed students in the challenges of drawing ‘en plein air’ from dawn till dusk (and beyond!), setting the pace for the three years ahead of them.

Student Julia Watson provides an account of the trip…

‘We set sail (or took flight!) to the Scilly Isles. Our destination was Tresco, the second largest island within the collection; we were embarking on a week-long trip to see what we could learn as ‘freshers’. On arrival, after two lengthy boat trips, we found the island had a seemingly familiar landscape, except that it was presented in such an alien fashion: parts looked as bleak as Dartmoor, but with beaches which you would expect to find in The Bahamas. This was definitely not our usual territory; it seemed practically exotic, you had to remind yourself that you were only 40km off Land’s End.

Once off the boat, we were driven to our respective housing for the week. The island was run with such efficiency that it brought to mind Centre Parcs or Butlins; island-employed staff maintained the gardens and landscapes as well as manning the gift shop, among other roles. An idyllic job if there ever was one, if you could get over the cabin fever that I suspect a long haul on the island might bring.

We were loaned bikes for the week, free of charge. This brought an odd sense of freedom as the lack of cars meant we could get around without fear of being hit. Though a member of our group did manage to tumble over their handlebars on the first day, injuring both elbows and spending the remainder of the week slightly subdued.

By bike, you could see the whole island in less than an hour. I often found myself confused, as I would think I was setting off for the other end of the island, and find myself where I began without any knowledge of how I had managed it. A quick refresh of my map reading skills rectified this, for the most part. Getting lost on Tresco never felt like a bad problem to have.

With free entry to the incredible Abby Gardens, along with amazing landscapes, there was never a lack of something to draw. We were often tasked with certain drawings to make, but for the most part, we were set loose to explore and make what we wanted.

I took advantage of the sunrises and sunsets in particular. They were consistently astounding; my roommate and I managed to make three out the five rises, at 6:30 am each time. I filmed the majority of them, capturing a lasting memory and primary resource for my work, which integrates drawing and film.

The entire week was beyond description, as it allowed us to make, and be independent whilst in an amazing environment. Plus, the last night at the pub was pretty memorable – a lot of bad swing dancing and drinking. All in all, would wholeheartedly recommend’.

 

BA(Hons) Drawing student illustrates oesophago-gastric anastomosis technique for Derriford Hospital

Second year BA(Hons) Drawing student Hannah Berrisford has completed work with the oesophago-gastric surgery team at Derriford Hospital, Plymouth, resulting in a series of illustrations to help the team demonstrate an improved anastomotic technique developed at the hospital.

Hannah was approached to draw a few frames to help illustrate the new procedure and, already interested in medical illustration, Hannah felt this would be a good opportunity to see what was involved in that discipline.

Much of what turned into quite a lengthy project, involved working at distance, from Falmouth, with a Consultant Oesophago-gastric Surgeon in Exeter, sharing screens over WebEx, and using a Wacom tablet to make digital drawings, something that Hannah hadn’t felt was her forte. She worked with the surgeons using WebEx to modify the drawings as they understood their technique in more detail. Of the experience, Hannah says, ‘I  learned that communication with the commissioner is a vital part of the working process’.

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Hannah’s drawings have already formed part of a presentation given by the team at the International Society for Diseases of the Esophagus in Singapore, which included surgeons from Australia and the Unites States who are interested in adopting the new technique. Her clear illustrations enabled animation through PowerPoint, which showed the process without irrelevant details that inevitably form part of video.

A Consultant Oesophago-gastric Surgeon at Derriford Hospital wrote to Hannah to say ‘Thank you so much for the fantastic illustrations…Thank you for your patience in working alongside us (a team of five surgeons, who have all had input to your illustrations) to produce really excellent illustrations of a difficult three dimensional procedure’.

Of medical illustration, Hannah notes, ‘An understanding of the body is important. Had I not watched the operation on video, I wouldn’t have been able to understand why I was drawing certain things, which would have meant the project would have failed. It was a good learning experience’.

The final iteration of Hannah’s drawing will be published with the team’s paper, which is about to be submitted to the Journal ‘Diseases of the Esophagus’, an international journal with an impact factor of 2.15, cited 2370 times last year.

 

Falmouth School of Art Guest Speakers announced for spring 2017

The Falmouth School of Art Guest Speaker Programme resumes in February with a series of events featuring acclaimed artists and illustrators…

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Artist Joey Holder starts the season with a talk on 8 February. Working with scientific and technical experts, Holder makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. For a recent exhibition – against the backdrop of the emergent field of computational biology and the Google Genomics project – Holder invented ‘Ophiux’, a speculative pharmaceutical company, imagining its use of genetic sequencing equipment and biological machines to collect data from humans and to sample data from other organisms. She explains: ‘It seems as if everything has become a branch of computer science, even our own bodies probed, imaged, modelled and mapped: re-drawn as digital information’.

On 15 February artist Chantal Joffe will be in conversation with Falmouth School of Art’s Director Dr. Ginny Button. Joffe’s figurative paintings usually depict women or girls, from catwalk models, porn actresses and literary heroines to mothers, children and loved ones. Her paintings question expectations of what a feminist art might be, often pointing to how appearances are constructed – whether in a fashion magazine or the family album – and to the choreography of display. Sometimes shown in groups but recently in iconic portraits, her images of women draw loosely on a range of sources such as photographs, magazines and even reflections in the mirror, using distortion to make her subjects seem more real. Her paintings achieve a psychological and emotional force, prompting reflection on ever-changing human relations and the endless complexity of looking.

1 March sees a return to Falmouth of Illustrator, author and Falmouth Honorary Fellow Posy Simmonds. Simmonds’ work includes many books for adults and children, including Literary Life, Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, the film of which was nominated for an Oscar. Working across a range of formats and contexts, Simmonds is probably best-known for her series of weekly cartoon strips commissioned by the Guardian since 1977. Gemma Bovery, her reworking of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France appeared first in the Guardian before publication as a graphic novel in 1999. Acclaimed by the critics for its wit and wickedly sharp observation, it was made into a feature film in 2014. Her prize-winning graphic novel Tamara Drewe also became a very successful film, directed by Stephen Frears.

Falmouth School of Art’s new Visiting Professor of Illustration delivers his inaugural lecture on 22 March. Graham Rawle is an internationally admired writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. He has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times and among his published books are The Card, The Wonder Book of Fun, Lying Doggo, and Diary of an Amateur Photographer. His collaged novel Woman’s World, created entirely from fragments of found text clipped from vintage women’s magazines won wide critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘a work of genius…the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ He is perhaps best known to some for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990.

We finish the 2016-17 Guest Speaker Programme with a TateTalk at Falmouth by Fine Art alumna (2001) Jessica Warboys. Warboys works across painting, performance, film and sculpture. Her talk is in association with Tate St. Ives, which in March will present a major solo show of Warboys’ work. The show will feature films, sculptures, large scale paintings, and Sea Paintings commissioned for the show and created along the Cornish coast. In her Sea Paintings, Warboys explores the connection between painting and performance, submerging damp, folded canvas scattered with coloured pigments into the sea, and allowing the movement of the waves to ‘paint’ the canvas.  Her work is informed by personal or collective memories – hystorical, mythical or fictional. Warboys currently lives and works in Suffolk and Berlin and has enjoyed wide international exhibition success, including solo exhibitions. Her work was recently included in British Art Show 8.

Registration is required for these events, and is open now: http://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.co.uk

See all Falmouth University events on our website: www.falmouth.ac.uk/events

Writing as art practice; drawing pedagogy; illustrators and communities in crisis…

Senior Lecturers from Falmouth School of Art have been helping shape national debates and dialogues surrounding writing as art practice, drawing pedagogy and reportage illustration, through recent conferences presentations around the UK.

 

Dr Neil Chapman, Senior Lecturer on BA(Hons) Fine Art was invited to present a paper and lead a workshop at the ‘Words of Art’ conference at Wimbledon College of Arts.

The conference formed part of a wider Words of Art project, seeking ‘to explore writing as art practice by considering tactile materiality, live spoken word or performative activity, site-specific writing practices and temporality’. Participants investigated ‘bridging gaps between the written form and object-oriented art practices, shifting the focus of writing from the computer screen to the studio, breaking down perceptions of barriers between writing on the one hand and art-making on the other’.

The conference gathered together invited practitioners who use written forms within their own practices and/or are involved in curating and publishing artists’ writing.

 

Neil said, ‘It was good to be part of an event at which some students as well as staff had the opportunity to show their work. The conference was preceded by a week of writing workshops — an effective way of galvanising interest in the themes among students in the lead up to the conference.

The usual conventions of a conference were disrupted in a number of ways, with diverse forms of presentation including performance readings, sound-art and audiovisual presentation, live drawing of diagrams and presentations assembling fictional elements with historical research. The event made evident the diverse approaches to writing being practiced widely in art education and art research, adding weight to the argument that artists have something new and important to contribute to research culture in the humanities and beyond.

In forthcoming work, staff of Falmouth School of Art will develop the network of those concerned with the politics and practice of writing in art, working with colleagues at Linnaeus University in Sweden and with staff and students at UAL to develop new work and research on questions of writing and the image’.

 

Dr Joe Graham, who this year joined the BA(Hons) Drawing team at Falmouth as Lecturer, delivered a paper at the 2016 iJADE (International Journal of Art & Design Education) conference, this year themed ‘Drawing’ and held at the University of Chester. The iJADE journal is published by NSEAD (National Society for Education in Art & Design), and the conference was entirely geared around pedagogical discussion of drawing used by communities within Art & Design Education. Among the keynote speakers was Simon Betts, External Examiner to Falmouth.

Papers spanned a wide variety of topics, demonstrating the value of Drawing to a range of disciplines far beyond art and design. Joe’s paper, titled Autonomic Drawing: Postphenomenological Drawing Research discussed his latest research from a pedagogical standpoint, describing the (phenomenological) method of variational practice as it is used within his work.

Joe demonstrated the application of the practice with the aid of nine A3 graph paper drawings, produced specifically to test this method, and explains, ‘The method of variational practice is used to seek invariant (essential) forms of understanding from within a variety of work presented for display. When used in combination with observational drawing, it renders the drawings sensible as ‘data’ i.e. results. This means the more fluid question of what drawing ‘records’ (re-presents) can be decided on an empirical basis. This outcome has useful pedagogical implications’.

 

Dr Catrin Morgan, Senior Lecturer on MA Illustration: Authorial Practice, delivered a paper at the International Illustration Symposium at Edinburgh College of Art. The conference was titled ‘Shaping the View: Understanding Landscape Through Illustration’.

Shaping the View: Understanding Landscape through Illustration

Catrin’s paper, The Myth of Reportage Illustration, explored ideas of authenticity and mark making in reportage illustration. Her paper was grouped within the panel, ‘Landscape as metaphor’, and examined the way in which Illustrators are increasingly being hired to report on and represent communities in crisis (communities in Syria, people living in refugee camps and endangered or destabilised communities for example).

Catrin explains, ‘I am concerned with the ethical implications of aesthetic choice made by these illustrators and what it means as a creative practitioner to report back on the lives of other communities. What voice do we use to do this? How might we choose to foreground our own presence in the situation we are depicting? Are there a set of aesthetic conventions that are establishing themselves as the language of authenticity?

Being critical of and asking questions about how artists address challenges faced by communities is vital to ensuring that the role that illustrators (as creative practitioners) play in society is truly valuable and useful. I am concerned that all areas of illustrative practice are interrogated critically, particularly those that have the social and political relevance to vulnerable communities’.

Among examples Catrin discussed were Anna Cattermole, who works with communities in Cornwall, Gill Gibbon who draws at arms fairs and Olivier Kuglar and George Butler who have reported on various communities internationally.

Alana has the Edge

Alana Bullock, one of our second year BA(Hons) Drawing students, has recently been awarded the Falmouth School of Art Edge Award for 2016/17 and will now be off to Paris in the summer to study Character Animation at GOBELINS.

The Moving Drawing © Alana Bullock

The Falmouth School of Art Edge Award is an annual award designed to encourage students either to explore an area outside of their discipline, or to support the development of particular skills (practical or theoretical) that could enhance their practice. However, the hope is that future academic work – and future creative innovation – will be informed and enriched by the experience gained, giving the recipient of the award new, potentially innovative perspectives or ‘edge’. The Falmouth School of Art Edge Award 2016/17 was open to all enrolled Level 2 undergraduate students in the school.

The Drawing Studios 2 © Alana Bullock

Orphan © Alana Bullock

 

“Winning the Edge award has enabled me to do something that just would not have been thinkable otherwise.  Drawing is the cornerstone of animation, and the opportunity to attend The Gobelins School in Paris over the summer for their two week character animation course, will give me the fundamentals to prepare me for the third and final year of my course, to implement what I’ve learnt as we dedicate ourselves solely to our own projects.  I feel that my work and myself will be enhanced and stronger because of it.” Alana Bullock

 

Highlight Creative Fair Saturday 3rd December

The Highlight Creative Fair was founded by students Lucy Rivers (BA(Hons) Illustration) and Megan Fatharly (BA(Hons) Drawing), and FXU Falmouth President and former Fine Art student Chris Slesser, as a way to utilise the new Fox café atrium space and for students’ work to be celebrated and highlighted and for students to meet, collaborate and create.

Entry is free and open to the public.  Holding a stall is free and open to staff, students and alumni. It is hoped that this will become a regular event.

ELLA-STRATED: Tania Kovats at Falmouth

(C) Ella Kasperowicz

Tania Kovats ran through a timeline of her work and travels to an inspired audience on Wednesday 2nd November 2016, answering some tough questions at the end about her ideas process. Illustration by third year student, Ella Kasperowicz.

BA(Hons) Drawing – the first Drawing Debate

BA(Hons) Drawing second & third year students – The First Drawing Debate

A group of BA(Hons) Drawing second and third years held the first Drawing Debate of this academic year.  There was much discussion and some disagreement about the subject, ‘Is Drawing a Skill?’  The debate was ably chaired by third year student Ralph Nel, who moderated the enthusiastic contributions from an audience consisting of all three years of the course.

Isles of Scilly Trip a Big Success

BA(Hons) Drawng students at Gallery Tresco

Last week BA(Hons) Drawing First Year students spent six days on the island of Tresco, making drawings in the Abbey Gardens and working from the stunning and varied landscape.  This annual trip once again coincided with the opening of the BA Drawing show at Gallery Tresco and several drawings were sold at the Private View to visitors to the islands.

 

 

 

Artist Tania Kovats to talk at Falmouth

“I think all artists are witnesses. And sometimes you have to be a responsible witness”.

Tania Kovats joins us in Falmouth on Wednesday 2 November. Her work explores our experience and understanding of landscape. Since receiving the Barclays Young Artist Award at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1991, Kovats has become known for her sculptures, large-scale installations, temporal works and drawings.

Evaporation, Tania Kovats, solo exhibition, installation view, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester (2015)

Rain II, 2015, ink on blotting paper, framed, 59.7 x 54.3 cm, 23.5 x 21.4 in

Kovats’ interest in drawing is reflected in works including British Isles and All the Islands of All the Oceans. She is also author of The Drawing Book – a Survey of drawing: the primary means of expression (2007), and Course Director for MA Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, London.

Perhaps best known for her large-scale works in the public realm, Kovats produced Tree (2009), a wafer thin longitudinal section of the entire structure of a 200-hundred-year old oak, permanently inserted into the ceiling of the Natural History Museum. For Rivers (2012), installed in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh, Kovats collected water from one hundred rivers around the British Isles, housing the collection in a specially constructed boathouse. A major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Oceans (2014), explored her preoccupation with the sea.

Kovats’ practice has seen her undertake residencies in the Galapagos Islands and the Astronomy Department at the University of Cambridge, travel to the Arctic as part of the Nowhereisland project and to points on the globe where seas meet, from New Zealand to northern Denmark, for her work Where Seas Meet. Tree (2009) resulted from six months exploring South America with her husband and son.

All the Sea (detail) 2014, Tania Kovats, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

This year, her exhibition Evaporation (2016) at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester again focused on water. The exhibition was commissioned by Cape Farewell, the organisation which provides a cultural response to the issue of climate change. Evaporation also included All The Sea, previously shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; 365 bottles of water from the world’s seas, collected by Kovats in large part through an invitation to the public to help her to bring all the seas together in one place.

Tania Kovats will give a talk on her work and practice at Falmouth School of Art, 2 November 2016 at 5pm, Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus. Booking required, click here to register. 

 

 

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After completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in 1990, Tania Kovats (b.1966) won the Barclays Young Artist Award at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991. She has been the recipient of many awards such as the Henry Moore Drawing Fellowship (2004-5), Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University (2006) and the Cape Farewell Lovelock Art Commission (2015). She has been nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery: 6th Edition (2015-17) and completed a residency in the Astronomy Department at the University of Cambridge. Kovats has shown extensively in the UK and abroad, with solo shows including those at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Peer Arts, London, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall and the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council, The British Council, Government Art Collection and the V&A. She is represented by the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.

AnOther interview with Tania Kovats, December 2015

 

Gemma Anderson workshop: The Big Draw at the Royal Society

BA(Hons) Drawing Lecturer Gemma Anderson will be delivering a free Isomorphology drawing workshop at the Royal Society Saturday 22 October, for an event as part of The Big Draw.

The Big Draw at the Royal Society event brings together art and science in a series of workshops and activities.

Read more about the event online here and here.

 

ELLA-STRATED: James Binning at Falmouth

(C) Ella Kasperowicz

James Binning delivered a talk, representing architectural collective ‘ASSEMBLE’, on Wednesday 12th October 2016. Winners of the Turner Prize, their use of networking, making the most of limitations and improving communities was very inspiring. Illustration by Ella Kasperowicz (http://www.instagram.com/ellaismental)

 

Celebrating the legacy of Anna Maria Fox

BA(Hons) Drawing recently marked its move to the Tanachie Garden Studios with an event in collaboration with Scary Little Girls Productions, which brought to life Falmouth’s most famous philanthropist, Anna Maria Fox.

Scary Little Girls have been marking Anna Maria’s 200^th anniversary year with community events, and worked with the Drawing team to bring a modern-day Anna Maria to Falmouth Campus to open the new studios. Anna Maria’s ideas saw the formation of The Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in 1833, home to Falmouth’s first art classes, now The Poly.

The celebration featured children from Mawnan Smith School, who sang, played instruments, performed a dance and told the assembled crowd about Anna Maria’s life. The children then joined BA(Hons) Drawing students and invited guests, including Charles Fox of Glendurgan Garden, for lunch and a portrait drawing class featuring the modern-day Anna Maria Fox – Scary Little Girls’ Patricia Grace-Norton – as the model.

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A Portrait of Anna Maria Fox – Celebration at Falmouth Campus

 

 

Staff, students and passers-by are invited to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Anna Maria Fox, Falmouth’s most famous philanthropist and life-long champion of the arts, culture and science in the town.

The arrival of a modern-day Anna Maria will be celebrated by music and dance from local school children from Mawnan Smith, and also marks the grand opening of Tannachie Garden Studios, the new location of BA(Hons) Drawing.

Students from Falmouth School of Art will then join invited guests and children in a drawing class.

 

ELLA-STRATED: Alan Kane at Falmouth

(C) Ella Kasperowicz

The autumn programme of Guest Speakers at Falmouth School of Art started with Alan Kane visiting on Wednesday 28th September 2016. As well as discussing his work, he discussed his ideas about everyone having a creative outlet – from gurning, to arranging stacks of speakers, to collecting objects. 

Falmouth School of art Guest Speakers announced for autumn 2016

We’re excited to announce the line-up of Guest Speakers for our autumn programme, commencing Wednesday, 28 September. All events are free, but booking is required, as spaces are limited. To register for any of these events, use our Eventbrite page: https://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.co.uk

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We start with Alan Kane, on Wednesday 28 September at 5pm, whose installations and photographs often question the distinction between high art and everyday creativity, often bringing commonplace objects into artistic contexts. His most celebrated work is Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK (2000-5), co-curated with Jeremy Deller. The archive brought together drawing, film, performance, costume, decoration, political opinion, humour and objects in a celebration of the diversity and richness of Britain’s folk art. Life Class: Today’s Nude (2009) involved broadcasting a life drawing class nationwide on Channel 4, sharing with daytime TV audiences the esoteric world of the artist’s studio.

On 12 October we’re joined by James Binning, of the Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble. Assemble are based in London and began working together in 2010. Encompassing the fields of art, architecture and design, Assemble’s practice seeks to address disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Their working practice is interdependent and collaborative, actively involving the public as participants and collaborators. Assemble’s 2015 Turner Prize winning project in Liverpool involved the refurbishment of a group of houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, worn down by neglect. Some residents had began the process of regeneration – planting gardens and painting murals – and the community land trust that now runs the neighbourhood brought Assemble on board. Binning completed his Foundation in Art and Design at Falmouth in 2006.

In association with CAST and The Cornwall Workshop, Ruth Ewan is our guest on 19 November. Ruth’s work includes events, installation, writing and printed matter. Her practice explores overlooked histories of radical, political and utopian thought, bringing to light specific ideas in order to question how we might live today. Always engaging with others, her projects involve a process of focused research and close collaboration –  recent projects have led her to develop context specific projects within schools, prisons, hospitals, libraries, universities, Parliament and London Underground.

On 2 November, we welcome Tania Kovats. Kovats’ sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Best known for her large-scale works in the public realm, Kovats produced Tree (2009), a wafer thin longitudinal section of the entire structure of a 200-hundred-year old oak, permanently inserted into the ceiling of the Natural History Museum. For Rivers (2012), she collected water from one hundred rivers around the British Isles. Oceans (2014), explored her preoccupation with the sea. Kovats’ interest in drawing is reflected in works including British Isles and All the Islands of All the Oceans. She is also author of The Drawing Book – a Survey of drawing: the primary means of expression (2007), and Course Director for MA Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, London.

Finally this term, Falmouth alumnus Hew Locke returns, this time as our Visiting Professor of Fine Art, an appointment that we are delighted he has accepted for the next three years. Locke’s investigation of the display of power includes areas such as royal and swagger portraiture, coats-of-arms, public statuary, trophies, financial documents, weaponry and costume. He states: ‘This …(work is) essentially about power – who had it, who has it and who desires it’.

 

 

Theo Crutchley-Mack at Gallery Tresco

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack | Towards Teän, 72x50cm, Acrylic, Ink, Spray, Graphite on paper, 2015

BA(Hons) Drawing alumnus Theo Crutchley-Mack will this month exhibit 10 new works from his residency on Tresco Island.

Last summer, Theo was awarded the Tresco Prize for Drawing, an award created by Lucy Dorrien-Smith, owner of Tresco after she was inspired by Theo’s work during the Drawing course’s study visit to the island.

Of his new work, Theo says, ‘the residency was a rare opportunity to spend 100% of my time focusing on drawing and painting, which resulted in a very productive month. Tresco is somewhere that I can see myself returning to many times in the future. The seamless tropical landscape pushed my work to a new area, which is evident in this series”.

Theo’s work can be seen 16-23 July, at Gallery Tresco, and more of his work can always be seen on his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theocrutchleymack

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, Apple Tree, 76x55cm, Acrylic, Ink, Spray, Graphite on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, Eastern Isle, 77x56cm, Acrylic, Collage, Ink, Spray on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, Enys Samson, 79x56cm, Acrylic, Collage, Ink, Spray on paper, 2016

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, New Grimsby at Dawn, 75x52cm, Acrylic, Collage, Ink, Spray on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, The Blockhouse, 59x39cm, Acrylic, Collage, Ink and Spray on paper, 2016

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, The Road Makers, 42x42cm, Acrylic, Ink, Spray on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, The Scillonian, 67x52cm, Acrylic, Charcoal and Ink on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, Through Trees, 52×46, Acrylic, Ink, Graphite on paper, 2015

(c) Theo Crutchley-Mack, Towards Round Island, 68x47cm, Acrylic, Collage, and Spray on paper, 2016