These pages show student work for Fine Art BA students graduating in 2020. The pages have been designed and produced by the students themselves, often using the layout and interactive properties of the website to conceptualise it as an exhibition space, so they are all very different! Clicking on a student picture will take you to their page, and there is more information written by the student available through the “read me” on each page. Enjoy.
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Statement from Dr Sarah Casey
Director of Study for Fine Art
To say we are living in times of uncertainty has almost become a cliché. On 28th March 2020, five days after the UK’s ‘lockdown’, the Observer published a cartoon, depicting a couple looking out at their metaphorical future drawn as a giant cloud of uncertainty[1]. The cloud looms above the couple, an ominous threat to the stability of their norm. While this caricature inevitably reflects concerns we have all encountered in the past few months, it’s worth pausing to reflect on what it means to live with uncertainty.
The contingent is not inherently negative. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the arts, where it is a necessary provocation for creative thought. As Donald Barthelme has written ‘not knowing is crucial to art, it’s what permits it to be made’2. To start off on the path of making work, is not to know the outcome at the outset.
This idea is familiar to these artists graduating from the Lancaster Fine Art degree. Over the past three years of study they have been encouraged to experiment, engage in creative risk-taking and seek opportunity for destabilising predictable expectations. Six months ago, none of us expected to be celebrating the achievements of these artists in a digital form. It is testimony to their flexibility, willingness to experiment and take risks that Borderless is successfully launched online 18th June 2020 as the world remains in the grip of a global pandemic.
Many of these graduates chose to come to Lancaster to take advantage of Lancaster’s 24/7 studio access and theory/practice mix to develop their own interests unhampered by a ‘house style’. The individuality of each artist’s work is reflected in the personalised pages of the Borderless exhibition. Although the pandemic forced studios be temporarily closed, this degree show demonstrates their creative ambitions continuing to develop beyond the boundaries of the studio. And, just as in daily life we have rapidly adopted new language and practice – ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’, ‘zoom’ – these students have embraced new approaches, techniques and ways of presenting their work to audiences, displaying their inventiveness, resilience and determination to make new work for new times.
On behalf of all the Fine Art tutors at Lancaster, I wish everyone the best of luck as they graduate, knowing they are well equipped to deal with the contingencies of the future.
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[1] Chris Ridell ‘Coronavirus: everything must change – cartoon’ , the Observer, 28th March 2020
[2] Donald Barthelme, cited in Fortnum & Fisher On Not Knowing How Artists Think, (London: Blackdog, 2013) 8.