University of Dundee’s 2015 Art, Design and Architecture degree show launches on Friday 22 May, with the preview taking place at the university’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design campus on Perth Road.
And, for the first time, you’ll be able to enjoy the preview even if you can’t make it to Dundee on Friday night: the show will be live streamed on the DJCAD site from 6pm.
You’ll find Dundee, along with over 75 other degree shows across the UK, featured in the 50-page a-n Degree Shows Guide 2015. Also in the guide are features, previews and interviews, including the Class of 2015 series, which sees five students discussing their forthcoming degree show – including Eilidh Wilson, a final-year student studying Art, Philosophy, Contemporary Practices BA (Hons) at Duncan of Jordanstone.
Here, Wilson discusses her work, how it has developed over the past year and her hopes for the show.
How would you describe your work?
My work is a means of documenting social engagement. The video documentation of events focuses on conversations that inspire action and networks of support. I use printmaking to visually demonstrate the strategies used in the media, while my sculptural work contrasts organic materials – representing grass roots movements – with the cold steel of dictatorship. It is a symbolic representation of resistance, tension and a lasting hope of success.
How has your work developed in your final year?
Over the last few years I have experimented a lot; this year I just wanted to express my passions and reflect upon how I have grown as a person. I wanted to be able to engage with an audience in the hope of sparking some interest in what the work is about. The conceptual basis of this work is relying on others to finish it, taking the time to engage with people. This is fundamental – sometimes art can be so introverted.
What are you doing for your degree show?
The theme could be described as witnessing resistance or exposing all forms of oppression; I want the audience to engage with the prints and the documentation of events to build up a story in their mind.
What would you like your degree show to achieve?
I hope my work will create a need for a greater understanding of how perception is conceived. The works are not an attempt to be the voice of people who are silenced, but rather they ‘out’ the fact that they have been silenced.
Do you hope to sell any of your work and are sales important to you at this stage?
I am not sure that the works will sell – taste is very subjective.
Are you nervous?
I don’t think I will be nervous until I leave the space for assessments. There are very much two states of mind for me: hating my work in fear of it not making the statement it needs to, and thinking that it could not be more apt as a showcase of what I have learned in Dundee.
University of Dundee’s Art, Design and Architecture degree show: preview 22 May, continues 23-31 May, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Perth Road, Dundee. www.dundee.ac.uk/degreeshow
First published as “I want the audience to build up a story in their mind” in the a-n Degree Shows Guide 2015.
More on a-n.co.uk:
Read Eilidh Wilson’s a-n blogs
