LICA 2020

Welcome to our degree show!

We would like to personally thank all the students for working alongside us in being able to achieve such a feat and all the staff for their ever-present and unwavering support! In particular, we would like to thank Pip and Nathan; without their dedication to moving the degree show online, such an achievement would not have taken place. 

We would also like to thank Mark Simmonds, our website designer, and Ralph Mackenzie, our website builder, for constantly taking on student feedback and adjusting their work to fit. It has been a pleasure to work with them both. 

Finally, we would like to thank all of you, sitting at home in front of your devices, for supporting our students through visiting our site.  

Whether you are students, staff, friends, family, or a stranger, we would like to take this moment, as the incredibly proud co-chairs, to welcome you to the first-ever online degree show for our 2020 graduates!

Liv Gresswell and Skye Williams, Co-Chairs of LICA Degree Show Committee

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Statement from Degree Show Committee

If ‘success is not to be measured by the position someone has reached in life, but the obstacles they have overcome while trying to succeed’, then this is the most successful year group we have ever had at LICA. These artists, designers, film- and theatre-makers, will be remembered for overcoming many obstacles over their three years… Brexit, Covid and nation-wide staff strikes…  The discipline and determination to stay on course throughout has been inspiring.

When they conceived of it back in the winter, our students were not to know how appropriate their title “Borderless” would be to the present moment: a virus has shown us how interconnected our bodies and communities are with others around the globe, and social uprisings right now are showing that our window on the world often presents only a fraction of peoples’ experiences and feelings.

On the pages for this show, you will find a truly boundless array of student approaches to the task of making and showing arts in the unique conditions of today. We have had a particularly strong year for new media and digitally-native approaches including experimental video, 3D animation, augmented reality and animated montage, and of course these are well represented on the website. But there are also examples where the digital has been injected into more traditional modes of art making: theatre shows that are documented using multi-camera views, animated paintings, and post-production notes showing process, detail and exhibition ideas, or adding narrative and poetic texts to drawing layouts. For many the website will not match the experience that would have been had in a physical show, but there is a very rich and diverse set of practices on show here which will outlast this moment.

We’d like to thank in particular students on our Degree Show Committee and most especially Liv Gresswell and Skye Williams who have led and coordinated an alternative online celebration with enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism – we are proud of you – you represent what is finest about Lancaster University and what it takes to be an Artist. Let us not forget lockdown and the added pressures on them to strive forward in physical isolation. Many students may feel discouraged about graduating in these circumstances, we see it a different way – what potential employer wouldn’t be impressed by a Graduate of 2020? We applaud you for exceeding the best you thought you can be.

Pip Dickens, Lecturer in Painting & Year 3 Course Convenor and Nathan Jones, Lecturer Digital Media

At this moment when the graduates from our courses this year are leaving us, we get the chance to see and reflect on their achievements over the past three years. While not having the presentations on campus, we are very pleased that the students have put together this site, to capture their achievement and mark this moment. This year, much more than ever, the sense of being on a journey where the map is uncertain is more palpable than ever. Just over the past few months we’ve all had to rethink how we carry out our professions in very different ways. It throws the spotlight onto what we do, why we do it, and what it means to have audiences in creative disciplines. Whether its product or performance, critique or commodity, seeing and experiencing in different ways is key.

Working from home at present means I saw the fledgling jackdaw negotiate a few days being fed by hand by neighbours before taking to the wing. As Head of Department, there is something very important to me about this time of the year when our graduates take flight too. We wish them well.