Talking about hypocrisies
Sheree Naqvi, BA Fine Art Painting and Drawing, Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
I began at Swansea with the naive desire to paint landscapes and seascapes for the duration of the course; little did I know that I was about to undertake a vast creative journey.
Art has become a way of talking about the hypocrisies I have witnessed within contemporary eastern society. The possibilities of painting, photography, sound, performance and installation have changed my art-making processes.
As my conceptual practice has developed I have started to challenge my hybrid identity and the dichotomies associated with this identity: east and west, male and female, active and passive, public and private, and the prescribed gender roles within a male-dominated Asian culture.
My work is both ambiguous and challenging and involves piles of black female hair. The raw material was brought into the UK in a suitcase following a visit to my home in Pakistan in 2016. It is strange how the hair itself has been on a journey, escaping Asia to start a new life in the west, from a restricted space to a liberated one.
In my work this journey becomes important as I explore concepts of loss and courage through dusty clumps of hair. Female roles within the private space of ‘home’ are manipulated through representations of domesticity.
I see my degree show as another beginning to a much bigger journey. It is exciting to think that the work will be seen by a diverse group of people which could create unexpected conversations and connections.
Degree show: 19 May – 2 June. www.uwtsd.ac.uk/art-design/summershows
Sexuality and seduction
Eman Ali, MA Fine Art, Photography, Royal College of Art, London
My background is in photography and, although I applied to that department, I entered the RCA with a clear intention to expand my practice beyond the two dimensional surface; to take risks and experiment with other mediums that serve to express my ideas.
My practice and research focuses on the female body as an object of desire and its relationship with consumerism. I have been exploring how the language of advertising plays a central role in perpetuating religious ideologies related to sanctity and purity. My focus is on one particular product; I won’t be displaying the physical object but will be appropriating its language and symbolism.
I have been interested in the role of luxury concession spaces found in shopping malls in creating micro worlds that sell desire. Similarly, my idea for my degree show is to create a seductive alternate space that, upon entering, would entice and engage the various senses of the audience. I will be displaying an installation, photos, text in the form of screen-printed posters, a sound piece and a customised scent.
Additionally, I am exploring the taboo subjects of sex and sexuality which, as a female Arab artist, is something I find important to discuss, especially in the context of the wider political climate. I hope I can invite the audience to question socially constructed ideologies related to the female body, and the impact this has on our behaviour.
Degree show: 24 June – 2 July (closed 30 June). www.rca.ac.uk
Space for interpretation
Chloe Milner, BA (Hons) Sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art
I started off wanting to create work that would have an effect on how a space feels but I hadn’t realised what a big effect the space has on the work. Over the last two years I have continually tried work out in different spaces. I’ve then developed the work in response to feedback from the space, as well as from peers and tutors.
For the degree show I am compiling an installation made up of papier maché casts of stones. On the one hand these forms are very familiar to us, but also strangely translucent and delicate. For me, there are allusions to impermanence, absence, and memory, the mind’s idealisation of things or people left behind. But I’d like people to make their own inferences.
I think the work can be interpreted and appreciated on different levels; from the aesthetic of the form, along with any personal associations it may have for the viewer, to interest or wonder evoked by the changed nature and context of the object.
My initial research led me to make these stone forms, but then the work started to leave behind its original inspiration. I reached a stage where the reasons for making them took a back seat – the placing and context became the important part. At this point new themes and concepts began to emerge; the work has come to have a different meaning and association to me than it originally did.
Degree show: 3-10 June. www.eca.ed.ac.uk
Sculptural sounds
Thomas Tyler, BA Fine Art, Teesside University, Middlesbrough
Lately my work attempts to question or even reject how we might consider sculpture. For example, approaching through video/sound or as a hybrid – so in a sense sculptural video or audio assemblages.
I have been doing work under the name Plastiglomerate which might be considered an amalgamation of all these approaches: experimental sound blends through tape loops, FX pedals and consumer electronics, in order to fabricate dense, tangible structures of sculpted noise and space.
Recently I had a show with Scaffold Gallery in Manchester that was working with ready-made objects wired up to manipulate sound. One assemblage consisted of a mic’d up water dispenser tank with a funnel attached that was filled with ice. As the ice melted the sound of water dripping into the tank was amplified.
My idea was for it to be one-part performance/one-part installation and the exhibition in many ways was a response to our experience of time. I have been building on a lot of these ideas and approaches for my degree show and drawing on this improvisational approach to ready-mades or cultural artefacts.
I am hoping that the work I produce for my degree show might begin to draw a parallel between audio and sculpture, as the two are common recurrences within my practice whilst still seeming to exist as something distinct. At the moment my thoughts are going into how the two might become one.
Degree show: 24 May – 5 June. www.tees.ac.uk
This is an extract from a-n Degree Shows Guide 2017. Read the full article here:
