- Venue
- Sheffield Hallam University and S1 Artspace
- Location
- Yorkshire
Charlotte A Morgan talks to Becky Shaw, artist and Creative Art Practice course leader at Sheffield Hallam University.
CM: Critical Writing Collective was invited to cover degree shoes in Yorkshire with writers Millpond who are based in Leeds. While some of the writers are writing reviews, we didn’t want to treat degree shows like all exhibitions and cover them in the traditional critical format but wanted to acknowledge their specificity as degree shows, which some of the reviews have highlighted. We also wanted to have a dialogue with staff and students about the nature of the degree show format and specific shows in the region, and touch upon wider issues surrounding art education and the nature of regional art communities. I’d like to ask you about how Creative Art Practice came about as a new course at Hallam. Was it a division of the Contemporary Fine Art course?
BS: The Fine Art course at SHU has a really long, respected history. The Creative Art Practice course was set up initially from the recognition that we were getting students who were really involved in making practices, but the critical and theoretical underpinning of our Fine Art course was not the right context for them to develop their work in. The course was set up initially with slightly more onus on input from other disciplines; it wasn’t strictly an applied arts course but courses like Jewellery and 3D Design were going to teach into it. That didn’t work out, which gave us the opportunity, as predominantly contemporary art practitioners, to try and make the Creative Art Practice course something that would have a different character to Fine Art, and where students might be fine artists but they might also be illustrators, graphic designers or artist comic book makers. There is a cross over with FA but the CAP course begins with a different perspective. CAP is much more about making processes, materials and techniques, and students’ research could equally be about Hegel or how the Renaissance make blue, while their research notebooks might be technical journals. The relationship between courses isn’t hard and fast; they have different characters, and because this is our first cohort we were waiting to see what that character was. FA has the lecture series Transmission, and CAP developed a series called Gravity to start to grow this character. In a way, how it develops now is in response to how art practice has changed, with the expanding boundaries including design and art and graphics and art.
CM: It’s interesting to hear where the Gravity lectures came from. I’ve been to a few of them and they seem quite critical, so as an outsider you wouldn’t necessarily think that they came from a different course to the Transmission lectures, but rather just that they have a different feeling to Transmission.
BS: Gravity has been a complete delight to make happen. We’ve had very few people say no, and there were people whose work we really liked but we didn’t know how they’d perform. Actually no matter how textual a practice is, artists have a way of articulating their work. Ian Kiaer was extraordinary and so was Karla Black; they were breathtaking in their level of articulateness and how informed they are. One of the things we have to be absolutely sure of is that the CAP students are not less informed or less well-researched in practice, it’s just that they might choose different areas. They do exactly as much theoretical work as FA but they often make slightly different choices when there are options available. It’s our job to make sure there are enough options made available to support their character.
CM: What are the different areas that they might choose?
BS: In the second year they have a choice of four or five streams and they can choose Art and Philosophy, Art and Psychoanalysis, Art and Materiality, Art and The Body and Art and Space and Place, and they tend to pick the last three as a general rule. I have a lot of CAP students in Art and Materiality.
CM: In the degree show, students from the two courses exhibited together but were subtly distinguishable through different coloured name tags. In some cases you might be able to tell which course the students were from, where in some cases they weren’t as distinct.
BS: That was entirely the students’ choice; we were really surprised and had always anticipated two shows. The other staff favoured the decision but I was much more thrown by it to begin with and unsure – I felt we had a lot to prove and wanted the students to be seen as different. The students were developing such good relationships across the courses and they wanted to work together, so the proviso was that they could be displayed together but they had to find a way for audiences to distinguish between the two.
CM: So they mingled quite a bit?
BS: In their third year yes.
CM: I wanted to talk about the form of the degree show as a practice for staging exhibitions, and how that worked for practices that don’t fit with the exhibition format? Does the degree show guide work in a certain direction or make it necessary to adapt in some way, and do problems arise in that for students but also for staff in the marking process?
BS: There are never problems in the marking because on our staff team, around a quarter of us don’t make exhibitions – we make live work, we make situated work – so it’s not a problem for the marking teams. I think degree shows have always been problematic in framing the exhibition as the normal distribution mechanism, but exhibitions are the normal distribution model of fine art practice or what we define as creative art practice; more so for fine art practice they are the norm. It’s recognition that the university art course is part of the nexus of galleries, critics and other art institutions. There’s an argument that universities ought to challenge that but they don’t, they’re part of the same critical infrastructure so they follow the agreed norms. There are always a proportion of students who don’t make work in that way. For example this year, Phoebe Wild ‘s (Fine Art) project involved learning the skills of the senior technicians and she is still doing that now, so she didn’t follow the end point agenda that degree shows have and her work is still happening. She is tasked with making that self evident and I know that is stressful as it’s a stress I have in my own practice. If exhibitions are the norm, it’s useful to have to deal with them at some point.
CM: It was useful for me as my degree show involved a live event outside of the university with exhibited documents, but I installed them in a way that invited a further interaction during the show, so it was confusing for me at the time.
BS: You realise how brutal that demand to make work evident is, but you have to play the game as well.
CM: Do you think that in Yorkshire, or more generally at regional universities, that the pressure of the degree show is different to at London universities?
BS: I think the pressures aren’t that different but the expectations are a bit different in that there’s always some idea that someone important will see your degree show work in London – the audiences are higher and there’s an idea that a collector might be in there somewhere. In a way that’s just as unlikely in London as it is here.
CM: And maybe it allows a bit more freedom to not have that imposed on the first show that you do.
BS: I think one of the great things is that the students realise that they’re putting on a great big party and the relationships they’ve built motivate them the most; that sense of doing something together as a group, particularly this year, seems to have overridden everything else. There’s no expectation of someone discovering them because they’ve discovered themselves. There are some students setting up new studios and groups; they really have understood about doing it themselves. They’re not thinking about who’s going to see their show because they already know what they want to do and they’re not waiting for anybody else.
CM: I was wondering how many graduates were planning to stay in the region, but also whether there is a desire to do self initiated projects right from graduation? Different year groups seem to have a different attitude to post graduate activity.
BS: It does depend on the personality of those people and the chemistry of the year; this year there are a number of people who work as groups who are definitely staying, who see that staying in Sheffield is critical to them continuing their practice.
CM: Do you think the widespread debates and feeling of unrest around art education have passed down to the students and perhaps inspired more DIY or self organised activity?
BS: That’s a good question; to be honest I’m not aware of it. Because we had such a difficult move from Psalter Lane to the City Campus at SHU and then into Arundel Gate Court, and these graduating students went through all that; they are really politicised about the problems within their own university, and obviously those problems are part of the national problems and international context, but they had a fight on their hands at a local level. I might be wrong and someone else might say differently, but I’m not aware of them being caught up in the problems within art education or education in general. Some students are very active, and they did participate in the protests, but I’m not aware of it as a group conversation.
CM: Do you think the increased fees might affect the type of student applying in the future? Perhaps more at MA level than BA. I’ve been debating with peers whether it’s a good time to do an MA, how possible it is financially and what the benefits are once you scrutinise the situation.
BS: None of us have a clue how BA recruitment will be affected. MA recruitment is always complicated because while people are thinking about the issues you mentioned, there are a lot of people from related areas – social sciences, social work, fashion design, teaching, illustration – who work in arts related professions and feel it’s time to take time out and they have always wanted to do a Fine Art MA. Either they’re losing their jobs and have a redundancy handout, or they’ve agreed a period of time out. They’ve got cash that they want to spend on themselves because the job market is so shit. So in some ways we’ve seen an increase in unusual students. At Hallam, the MA really prepares people for a PhD and is strong in that sense.
CM: Within Strategies for Free Education we are not staging an alternative to an MA but exploring ways of supporting each other with more focus. You miss the peer network and the contact with staff at university but also the focus that you can have on your practice, where other pressures are put to the side.
BS: When I worked with Static (Liverpool), Paul Sullivan and I wrote something called Maximum Return and I have to say it was brilliant. It basically stole the Whitney model and made a smaller British version of the Whitney programme which was more manageable. Obviously there are informal mechanisms but there’s also a whole market too – I’m amazed more people aren’t jumping into the ring with innovative ideas for postgraduate level work. The thing we proposed was to take ten artists on the strength of a really interesting proposal that they would work on over the year, and whenever there were visitors in town talking at say the Tate or Fact, they would teach into the programme and we’d meet monthly or bi-weekly. It would cost £6000 for one place, so each individual would be funded from a different body like the Arts Council, Tate or the Henry Moore Foundation. We weren’t able to do that for various reasons, but there are models that are out there and exciting and actually not as costly as an MA. Another thing is, some people I know have enrolled on PhD courses as part time students and found the money to pay their fees but they don’t actually have any intention of finishing. It’s just a means of engagement and to have a relationship with an institution.
CM: Can you carry it on for a number of years?
BS: Well eventually they’ll chuck you off, but part time PhD’s have much more fluidity as long as you have to have paid your fees. Of course we don’t really want people to do that! No-one is doing that here, but I do know people who are doing it.
This interview is in two parts, read more at www.a-n.co.uk/p/1390115
Becky Shaw is an artist, occasional writer, and course leader BA(Hons) Creative Art Practice, Sheffield Hallam University.
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Charlotte A Morgan is an artist based at S1 Artspace, Sheffield. She graduated with BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 2007 and co-founded Critical Writing Collective in 2008. http://www.charlotteamorgan.co.uk
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