MA Illustration: Authorial Practice – Exhibition Next Week!

We are excited to announce an exhibition taking place next week as part of the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival.  Seeing Voices is an exhibition of illustration and poetry, celebrating recent work by students, alumni and staff of Falmouth University’s MA Illustration: Authorial Practice course.

The exhibition will open Tuesday 20 November – Saturday 24 November in the Upper Gallery of The Poly, Falmouth

All welcome to the private view which is taking place between 5.30pm – 7.30pm on Thursday 22 November, followed by Poetry Slam from 8.00pm.

MA Illustration – Private View, Show and Performance Event

We are delighted to announce NEXUS, the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice end of year show at Falmouth Campus, and accompanying event and performance at The Fish Factory Art Space, Penryn…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private View and End of year show – All welcome to the Private View of the end of year show: 6-9pm on Tuesday 4 September, Tannachie Garden Studios, Falmouth Campus, Woodlane, Falmouth, TR11 4RH. The show then runs from Wednesday 5 to Sunday 9 September, 10am–5pm.

For more information, view the fantastic show website, featuring images and text from all the contributing artists. Also see the show Facebook page, and Instagram feed.

Performance Event – There will also be a special performance event on Thursday 6 September, 7-11pm at the Fish Factory Art Space, Commercial Road, Penryn, TR10 8AG. From the weird to the lyrical, the playful to the polemical; this year’s graduating MA Illustration students hold a night of performance, storytelling and song to accompany their end of year show; NEXUS. The evening also launches an exhibition of the artists’ manifestos, on show throughout the following week. – click here for the Fish Factory’s Facebook event.

 

 

MA Illustration: Authorial practice graduates win Laydeez do Comics Graphic Novel Prizes

The Laydeez do Comics Prize exists to provide “recognition and celebration of the wealth of comics work currently being produced by female-identifying people based in the UK”.

 

Emma Burleigh, a recent graduate of MA Illustration: Authorial Practice has won the first £2K Laydeez do Comics; Women’s Prize for Unpublished Graphic Novels in Progress for her graphic novel My Other Mother, My Other Self .

Emma is an artist and art teacher who is passionate about the vibrant, glowing and mercurial qualities of water-colour and mixed media. ” I’m interested in everyday life, the inner life and the layers of life in between.”  In 2015, she completed an MA in ‘Authorial Illustration’ at Falmouth University, with Distinction and My Other Mother, My Other Self is a development of her MA graphic novel, Birth Mother.

Birth Mother was an exploration in words and painting about her journey … Emma says ” It’s about tracing my birth mother who I traced about ten years ago, and it’s really just the story of how I found her and how our relationship unfolded. It actually becomes more about my relationship with myself.”

Emma was thrilled to be shortlisted for the prize as she has been working on her book for many years.

 

Rebecca Jones, a 2012 graduate also from MA Illustration: Authorial Practice, came fourth.

She said about her entry into the competition… “I’ve been making comics properly for about five years – cat zines that are a little bit fantastical and a bit silly. I’ve been trying to make something new by moving into social issues and doing something that’s a bit more personal. It’s called Boomerang and it’s about an unemployed psychology graduate who’s moved back home after graduation and it’s an exploration of issues around the 2008 recession and the following economic crash. It’s about a rite of passage of a few months of not knowing what to do and what it means to be an adult.”

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:

 

 

 

#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.

Last chance to see…at Imagine Falmouth

Beth Garnett, alumna of MA Illustration: Authorial Practice, is currently showing a collage – From the Headland at Mawnan I – as part of Falmouth Art Gallery’s Imagine Falmouth exhibition until this Saturday. The piece was produced during Beth’s participation in Falmouth School of Art’s Observational Drawing Intensive last July.

Beth Garnett, From The Headland At Mawnan I, 2017, Collage

After the success of Falmouth Art Gallery’s inaugural submissions show last year, ‘Imagine Falmouth’ has grown in scale, and is now a bi-annual exhibition and arts prize. The gallery invite emerging and established artists from across the county to submit their work. With no theme and no restriction on medium, the exhibition has reflected the very best of Cornish art today. The exhibition, which opened in November, closes on Saturday 20 January.

Falmouth School of Art Intensives offer a selection of 5-day courses for artists and art educators, all taking place in the studios and grounds of Falmouth Campus, and the surrounding area. Of her experience at last summer’s Intensive, Beth says, ‘The course was a really great timeout from real life to get back to drawing again, in beautiful surroundings. The tutors were supportive and offered really practical advice. The group size wasn’t too big and we had a lot of fun. I was able to find new directions for my work and new ideas for my process which has really refreshed my practice. I’m am sure will continue to impact on my drawing work for a long time to come’.

for 2018, Falmouth School of Art will run three Intensives; in Drawing, Abstract Painting and The Figure. Course descriptors will soon be available online, at www.falmouth.ac.uk/fsaintensives, where you can also find images from previous intensives, terms and conditions and a short application form.

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.’

Visiting Professor Graham Rawle to give inaugural lecture at Falmouth

(c) Graham Rawle, from The Wizard of Oz

Author, artist and designer Graham Rawle will give his inaugural lecture as Falmouth School of Art’s Visiting Professor of Illustration on 22 March 2017.

Internationally admired, Rawle is one of the UK’s most interesting and original visual communicators, known by many for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which appeared in the Guardian from 1990. A writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation, Rawle has a strong following for his eagerly-awaited published books, which include The Card (shortlisted for the 2013 Writer’s Guild Award), Graham Rawle’s Wonder Book of Fun 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.’ His reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz won Book of the Year and Best Illustrated Trade Book at the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards. Alongside these works, Rawle has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times.

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Graham Rawle. Photo credit: Jenny Lewis

Rawle’s flair and passion for education has been recognised through honorary appointments and awards. As a previous contributor to both Falmouth School of Art’s guest speaker programme and its Illustration Forum he already has a strong interest in Illustration here. Of his appointment in 2016, Rawle said, “It’s a great honour for me to have been made Visiting Professor of Illustration at Falmouth University. I have long admired the School of Art’s commitment to nurturing original and individual thinking in art and design. My own research in sequential design and visual narrative spans across illustration, literature and, more recently, film. I’m interested in how the principles of storytelling, particularly three-act structure, can be employed in the development of design strategies across a wide range of disciplines. I look forward to finding ways of making connections with students, staff and researchers at Falmouth”.

Rawle has established himself as a ground-breaking research-led writer, illustrator and designer, evidenced through the range and depth of key scholarly texts that cite and analyse his work. He teaches on the MA Sequential Design/Illustration and MA Arts and Design by Independent Project courses at Brighton and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate for Services to Design from Norwich University of the Arts.

Graham Rawle’s lecture at our Falmouth Campus is free, but registration is required, as seats are limited: Click here to register through our Eventbrite page.

Find out more about our BA(Hons) Illustration and MA Illustration: Authorial Practice.

 

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.

MA Illustration: Authorial Practice success at The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets 2016

Atlantic Press, an independent press associated with the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice course at Falmouth has won the prestigious Michael Marks Illustration Award.  The book’s illustrator Mairead Dunne received the award for her illustrations to Luke Thompson’s book of poems, The Clearing, which was published last summer.  Mairead is a graduate of the Authorial Illustration Masters course (September 2016).

The winners were announced at a special dinner with the shortlisted poets, publishers and illustrators at the British Library in December last year.  Mairead was presented the award along with a cheque for £1,000 by Lady Marina Marks, Chairman of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust.

The images are a contemplative series in photography, using experimental lenses and interventionist drawing. The work reflects and reveals the narrative, highlighting the sense of reader as voyeur, as well as developing the symbolism and ambience of the poetry.  Every copy of the clearing is unique, the cover birds having been individually hand-stamped by Mairead.

Steve Braund, Course Coordinator of MA Illustration: Authorial Practice and Director of Atlantic Press has written a piece about the work:

“The Clearing is one of a series of four ‘poet-illustrator’ collaborations we’ve published recently at Atlantic, the others being Stone by Em Strang and Mat Osmond, Pick Me Up by Anna Kiernan and Harriet Lee-Merion and On Ridgegrove Hill by Alyson Hallett and Phyllida Bluemel.

Attempting to illustrate poetry can be foolhardy as the ability of poems to picture subject matter so vividly make them powerful illustrations in themselves. So, we’ve tried to support collaborative conversations between the pairings of poets and illustrators where the images augment the words with a fair degree of ambiguity allowing open-ended readings. In addition, and of equal importance, is the attention to the design and typography: how the book feels in your hands, how the pages turn and the use of empty spaces. In The Clearing, as with the others in the series, the design was in the hands of the illustrator.

Part of the underlying excitement in all our books is in that suspension of disbelief where the ‘unreal’, the fictional construction (or sometimes imaginative take on the real), captivates the audience, holding their attention, taking them on a journey of the imagination, the story. The best results occur when the creator/s (in this case the poet and illustrator in collaboration) inhabit their characters from within. The storytelling never works quite as well when the characters feel consciously contrived as if from a distance. If your character cuts their knee, you need to feel their pain. If you don’t, then don’t expect your audience to either.

The publication was supported by a grant from the Arthur Quiller Couch Memorial Fund (Q Fund) and through Crowd funding.”

The Award was judged by Sir Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London from 2008 – 2015. The Illustration Award recognises outstanding illustration of a poetry pamphlet published between July 2015 and June 2016.  Sir Nicholas Penny considered illustration in any medium and was looking for a subtle and sustained relationship between image and text, as well as the overall quality of the images.

The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets are sponsored by The Wordsworth Trust, The British Library and the Michael Marks Charitable Trust in association with the TLS and the Harvard University Centre for Hellenic Studies.

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.

MA Illustration host symposium on Friday 11 November as part of Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival

Falmouth University’s MA Illustration: Authorial Practice will be hosting a symposium next Friday 11 November as part of the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival.  The event will take place at 3.00 – 5.00pm in Lecture 2 on the Falmouth campus.  The event is unticketed and free to both Falmouth University staff and students.  Please arrive early to secure your seat – doors will close once the seating is full.

The theme is ‘Creative collaboration between poets and illustrators’ and will be chaired by Dr Kym Martindale, Course Coordinator on Falmouth’s BA Creative Writing.  The symposium will feature poetry readings by Luke Thompson and Em Strang, and panel discussions with illustrators Mairead Dunne and Mat Osmond, with Steve Braund, Course Coordinator on Falmouth’s MA Illustration and Director of Atlantic Press.

Further information here: Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival

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)

 

MA Illustration graduate receives glowing review from InterAnima

Lucy Rose Kerr, who graduated from MA Illustration: Authorial Practice at Falmouth in 2014 has received a glowing review from Becalelis Brodskis, Creative Director at InterAnima.  Lucy was taken on at InterAnima under their placement scheme and has been named as an “outstanding employee”.

InterAnima are a community interest company ‘who use interdisciplinary arts to animate the stories that need to be told.  Celebrating individual expression and breathing life into community led positive solutions.  All profits support their social objectives: to use interdisciplinary arts to facilitate community development.’

Lucy was tasked with turning an extraordinary manuscript by artist Nicky Loutit – New years day is Black  into a format ready to approach to publishers.  Lucy worked with ‘sensitivity, creativity and diligence’ when taking on the manuscript and it certainly paid off as InterAnima were overjoyed to confirm last week that New years day is Black will be published this coming Autumn!

The book has also been given a glowing review from Eimear Mcbridge, Author of “A girl is a Half-Formed Thing”

Right from the start I found it completely gripping. Beautiful and horrifying… The human story had me at its beck and call the whole way through – utterly extraordinary. The evocation of that very particular loneliness irrelevant children feel was almost unbearable: Congratulations to Nicky Loutit for making work out of the terrible. Eimear McBride

Published by Propolis, New years day is Black is available to buy now, direct from their online book store – https://propolisbooks.co.uk/products/new-years-day-is-black-by-nicky-loutit 

 

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’.

 

 

Former Visiting Professor Deborah Levy shortlisted for Man Booker Prize

Falmouth School of Art is delighted to congratulate Deborah Levy on being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, for her novel Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton).

Levy served as Visiting Professor of Writing in Illustration to Falmouth School of Art between 2012 and 2015, delivering a series of well attended and thought-provoking lectures to students and the public.

Levy works across fiction, performance and visual culture. She trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their “intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination”, including Pax, Clam, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Macbeth – False Memories, all published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen).

Her novels include the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted, Swimming Home, translated into 14 languages, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved (all reissued by Penguin), Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury). Her 2012 short story collection Black Vodka was short listed for The Frank O’Connor Award and the BBC International Short Story Award. Her long form essay, ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, a response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’ and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is published in hard back by Notting Hill Editions, paperback by Penguin.

Bookmakers William Hill have declared Levy 2/1 favourite to win the prize.

2016 Guardian interview with Deborah Levy

The 2016 Man Booker shortlist:

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Oneworld)

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband)

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage)

All That Man Is by David Szalay (Vintage)

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Granta)

More about the shortlist

MA Illustration student wins The Andy Hocking Award

Ellie Robinson-Carter, a student of Falmouth’s MA Illustration won The Andy Hocking Award for Outstanding Contribution to Community Engagement at the FXU awards on Monday evening for her role in founding and running the Penryn Memory Café.   Ellie was presented the award by John Dukes, Police Representative for Falmouth University and the University of Exeter.

Ellie, a qualified dementia champion, supported by a small committee of volunteers, set up the Penryn Memory Café which launched back in September 2015.  Ellie continues to manage all aspects of the Memory Café from organising and leading activities at the fortnightly meets, to managing and recruiting new volunteers, maintaining and making new links with other community groups, attendance at local events to raise awareness of the Café and holding the monthly committee meetings.

The Memory Café welcomes those living with dementia and their carers to meet for activities, refreshments, to talk about their life stories and to help them meet new people and build relationships.  Since launching, the project has attracted a number of different society groups, creating a very important and diverse link with the local community which has rarely been seen before.  The Café meets on a regular basis every first and third Thursday of the month at the Penryn Temperance Hall.

If you would like to find out more about the Memory Café, you can email Ellie at: Erobinsoncarter78@googlemail.com.

Illustration Award for Mat Osmond

The Michael Marks Awards are now in their seventh year, and in 2015 a new ‘Best Illustration’ prize was awarded which was won by Mat Osmond, Senior Lecturer on MA Illustration at Falmouth.  Speaking about the new Illustration prize, Wordsworth Trust Director Michael McGregor says “This year for the first time we are delighted to announce an additional award for illustration, promoting the poetry pamphlet as an object of visual as well as of poetic beauty”.  The new award ‘recognises outstanding illustration of a poetry pamphlet published between July 2014 and June 2015’.  The judge, Nicholas Penny, was asked to ‘consider illustration in any medium and look for a subtle and sustained relationship between image and text, as well as the overall quality of the images’.

The Awards have been presented by The Wordsworth Trust and the British Library, with the support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust.  They have established themselves as one of the most significant awards in contemporary poetry, designed to raise the profile of poetry pamphlets, recognising the enormous contribution that they make to the poetry world.

Illustration Award Judge, Nicholas Penny (Director of the National Gallery, London from 2008 – 2015), wrote the following piece of Mat’s award winning pamphlet:

“Mat Osmond’s pamphlet Deadman and Hare:part 1, Fly Sings, published by Strandline Books, designed by Pirrip Press, is illustrated in an elegant but economic manner with black and white images which are sometimes miniature and specific and sometimes mysteriously abstract. They provide a sort of pictorial punctuation, cunningly placed and spaced, between and beneath the lines – thus, one cannot miss them or think of the poetry without them.”

The winners were announced at a special dinner at the British Library attended by an invited audience of poets, publishers, critics and supporters of poetry on the evening of Tuesday 24 November 2015.  The winner of the Poetry Pamphlet Award was ‘The First Telling’ by Gill McEvoy and the Publisher’s Award was won by Edinburgh based Mariscat Press.

The Falmouth Illustration Forum: Hidden Agenda

20 March 2015, Falmouth Campus, Falmouth University

Now in its thirteenth year, this internationally renowned event – organised by Falmouth’s MA Illustration: Authorial Practice – is open to guests nationwide.

This year’s speakers are again high profile practitioners from both illustration and publishing: Dan Fern (Professor Emeritus RCA), Anna Bhushan and Mireille Fauchon (both well-known illustrators), John Vernon Lord (Professor of Illustration at Brighton) and Max Porter (Senior Editor at Granta Books).

French novelist and poet Raymond Queneau, founder of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) wrote that [Oulipian] authors are ‘rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.’ Creativity thrives when it is subject to constraint; the Hidden Agenda Forum is interested in the hidden structures that creative people bring to their practice. These may be the straightforward structures of a working day, or more complex mathematical or temporal frameworks used to underpin a large-scale work.

This year’s forum has an underlying literary theme; all the speakers have been involved in the interpretation and production of classic works of literature, including explorations of the formal properties of Haiku, Ted Hughes’ Crow, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, The Bagvad Gita, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and Finnegan’s Wake.

Existing artworks offer ways into creating new ones; the Hidden Agenda might be the approach taken by the writer or illustrator when interpreting these existing works.

Tickets are available from the University’s online store, priced at £20 for the day-long event, with a special price of £10 for alumni of Falmouth’s MA Illustration: Authorial Practice.

Falmouth Four Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize

Air Dies Elsewhere by Catrin Morgan, Associate Lecturer, MA Illustration: Authorial Practice.

The UK’s largest and longest running annual open exhibition for drawing, The Jerwood Drawing Prize, has seen a strong Falmouth contingent this year, with three alumni and one member of staff joining luminaries in the final exhibition.

With over 3,000 submissions, the 2013 standard of entry was exceptional. An independent panel whittled down the ensemble to a final shortlist, and judges Kate Brindley, Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), Artist Michael Craig-Martin RA and Charlotte Mullins, Editor of Art Quarterly, selected a range of works representative of the diversity and excellence in current drawing practice.

Four Falmouth BA(Hons) Fine Art alumni – Paul Bradley (1993), Susannah Douglas (2003) and Olivia Jones (2013), and Catrin Morgan, Associate Lecturer in MA Illustration: Authorial Practice were shortlisted.

Drawing as a discipline in its own right was introduced at Falmouth in 2011 and offers a pure education in drawing, encompassing a wide range of approaches, traditions and applications. Phil Naylor, Head of Drawing & Foundation Studies, explains: “We believe that drawing sits right at the centre of visual practice; a core subject that encapsulates the essentials of the visual arts, but also translates across the broader terrain of science, technology and the wider cultural world.”

Also showing in London is RAW Drawing, an exhibition showcasing the work of second year BA(Hons) Drawing students at London’s RKB Gallery. Offering a diverse, unique and beautiful collection, the exhibition straddles all forms of the discipline from architectural design to surrealism.