UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - Inderveer Sodhi

What are the main themes you have explored in your work and why are they important to you?

I have looked into traditional Indian art and created scenes of modern day Britain and Slough. The aim of my work is to reflect day to day life as a British Asian and the multi cultural Britain of today. The influences behind my ideas and work are my experiences of growing up with a blend of two cultures, the western and eastern. I am portraying scenes of Slough, family gatherings and media. In terms of the tradition of Indian painting I have adapted the flat tone, bold colours and perspective.

I based the presentation of my work on 18th century wall paintings from northern India and created a collaged the works together.Though the traditional arts formed the basic inspiration behind my work I looked at many other artists mainly The Singh Twins, Mf Hussein and Amrita Sher Gill.  The artists that I looked at created work with blends of the tradition and contemporary by using the traditional perspective and layout with some western influences dealing with contemporary issues. The artists mentioned also challenged the western ideas of what contemporary art is, what is acceptable and other stereotypes such as no forms and figures, hidden meanings, depth, western subjects etc. Rather than turning away from artistic traditions for the sake of westernisation and to fit in they merged the traditional into their work. For this reason many of the artists I looked at dealt with issues such as identity and compatibility of traditions in today’s worlds etc.

What do you think is the most significant thing that has helped you during your time a UCA Farnham?

The most significant thing I have learnt or developed during my time at Farnham is a unique artistic style and identity. Though I questioned and struggled to find my own style, it was through my experiments with my work, reflecting and research during the first two years the led me to establish my own style which I developed during the third year. As my work is personal, questioning myself and my identity as a British Asian also contributed towards me developing my own style. Without questioning myself artistically and personally and through experimentation I would have not found my own style that appeals and reflects me best.

What are you planning next?

As I have now discovered my own style I am going to continue creating more work and developing my style and ideas further.

UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Success - Bearspace & GalleryNumber3 Private View Opening

For more info visit www.cargocollective.com/doorsinthewall
or www.twitter.com/_doorsinthewall

Open 10-6, 27th June-5th July 2014

UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - Miranda Harrison

 "The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most"

John Rushkin

Tell us what your work is about

I am seduced by colour, particularly when it is at the most vibrant end of the spectrum. I am fascinated by how people can be emotionally drawn to a colour and how the language of colour is evocative. My main themes are pure colour through light. A multitude of colour theories and the possibility/impossibility of an existentialist experience with colour. the emotional and cerebral experience of colour. Unnameable colours. 

How did you develop the idea that produced your final exhibition work? 

The ideas for my final piece came about via a number of different factors all coming together. Through rigorous and persistent experimentation with lights and marbles I kept creating colour spaces with lots of testing and multiple works, but none of them quite evoked the same personal and physical response of the first piece I created.  I realised that simplification and purity where important in the work, and through a group critique session discussed this and this helped to hone the work and I decided to use the first piece of work and resolve it. What was actually most important was the perfection of the space and the experience of being there with the work, not creating something elaborate. My biggest issues were being able to make the exhibiting space as perfect as I needed it. The interaction of the works with the spectator and the immediate architecture and material surfaces also became very important and something I explored and changed until it was just right.

Which sources have fed into the development of your work?

I have been very strongly influenced by the colour theories of Newton and Goethe and the dissonance between them. The letters written by the Modernist Colourfield artists and their approach to existentialism has intrigued me greatly too, as has the fine line between existentialism and phenomenology. Although I am drawn to and visually seduced by the vibrancy of colour, it has been the theoretical writings and images they can conjure in the minds eye that has had the greatest influence on my practice. 

What do you think is the most significant thing that has helped you during your time a UCA Farnham?

Without question the time spent discussing work with peers and tutors. Being present at Farnham in the studio, and just working in the studio space leads to so many ad hoc conversations and incidental remarks that can have the greatest impact on the development of work. 

                                  

What did you learn from the process of producing your Farnham exhibition?

Adaptability! The need to know when to be flexible and when to be determined. To have tested and tested and tested all that you can prior to install and that no matter how meticulous your planning, things happen that derail your plans, but knowing the end goal and knowing that everything else is planned means unforeseen issues can be met head on. 

What are you planning next?

I already have three commissions straight from finishing. In fact the first started during assessment. I am also applying for open submissions and planning for September. I'm looking into further study at postgraduate level and education.

http://www.mirandajharrison.com

UCA Farnham Fine Art Graduation 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B77IGxr1T0s

UCA Farnham Graduates 2014!

UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - Joe Presland

Tell us what your work is about and what informs it

I am interested in materiality and in the subjective process of aesthetic exploration. This is a process that is completely engrossing and personal. I try not to prefigure or conceptualise when I make the work. I want my work to be raw, and very much my interpretation and configuration of what I am responding to and working with. This absolute subjectivity has an honesty, it is not trying to be anything else. 
I have always been fascinated by a kind of unconventional beauty and I am always drawn towards imperfections and unique scars. The works I show are often damaged, deteriorating or dirty, and I use fragments of found images as well as things that I document and recycle. I am interested in the approach to  paintings made by Jean Michel Basquiat and Oscar Murillo, and I have really become interested in outsider artists, people working oblivious to the art world because of the surprising things that come out of their work. Finding your own process and language is important and so anyone that has developed their own way of making work to do something interesting would be attractive to me. Painting and making art in general is the artist's need to express their unique life experiences. Good artists are always looking to break boundary's with their work and rearranging reality and changing the value of things. Art is a celebration of dreams and disorder that liberates and elevates the viewer / maker from the confines of reality.

Artists who use appropriation and found object pieces directly from their environment, or what they encounter has always excited me. I like the idea of literally, pealing away part of the street, or atmosphere and putting into a gallery environment. I have collections of materials from pretty much everywhere I go, to digest into my work.

Collaging, isolating objects and elements changes their value, and allows us to look at them in a new way and reflect on what is going on or how things can be turned around.

I like to work with the by products or waste of my studio practice, and life in general. Often collecting materials from the floor, and outside world. objects and images from pop culture can occasionally appear in my work in a weathered, regurgitated way.

What do you think is the most significant thing that has helped you during your time a UCA 

Farnham?

Breaking my practice down and writing about my work and ideas has really helped me    

define what interests me. Also talks and conversations with tutors and other students about 

art has definitely been very positive and will stay with me for a long time. During the final

exhibition it was interesting how isolating and arranging some selected works can really 

make you notice them in a new light. The curating of works for exhibition is very much like 

the composition of the collage and paintings that I produce, but more complex, so the final 

exhibition at Farnham helped me think about my work in new way.

What next ?

Recently I have been making a lot of quick drawings and paintings from life. I have plans to 

get a larger studio space, so I can work on some large canvases and collages on the floor 

before stretching them. I want to continue exploring and developing, I am excited to see what 

my work will change into in the future. I want to build on the experience that exhibiting has 

given me from the final shows this year and exhibiting in London and Amsterdam.

UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Success - Graduate Exhibitions at Bearspace & Number3London, London

Fresh from the graduating on Tuesday, the 4th final year exhibition for Farnham Fine Art takes place from this Friday with the collective "Doors in the Wall". This group of ambitious artists are exhibiting work across two gallery spaces in south London; Bearspace and Number3London. 

Bearspace

52 Deptford High St, London SE8 3PQ

http://www.bearspace.co.uk/exhibitions/door-in-the-wall 

Number3London 

3 Creekside, Deptford, London SE8 4SA

(10am - 6pm Daily)

http://cargocollective.com/doorsinthewall 

The exhibition runs from 27th June until 5th July.

Srin Surti in Solo Exhibition - Bounding Line at Blyth Gallery, London

UCA Fine Art tutor, Srin Surti has a solo exhibition of new works at Blyth Gallery, London. The exhibition opens on 25th  June until 18th July.


http://srinivassurti.net/

UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - Stephanie Davies

What ideas have you explored and why are they important to you?

I consider myself an intermedia artist interested in exploring the proliferation of images and information that is surrounding us. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s term ‘Image Junkies’ I find myself fascinated with the compulsion to document, blog and photograph our daily lives. Past works focused on the family album/photo album and what we photograph. Bringing these ideas into the digital age I begun looking at online photo sharing and mass media. Using a variety of media and most recently, digital art, I aim to explore the ongoing impact of the mass of imagery on the world in the post internet era.

My current work focuses on mass media imagery and how it is ubiquitous from; the internet, television, radio, newspapers. Using hexadecimal coding techniques I corrupt this imagery beyond the point of recognition and place it back into its original context in order to make the viewer think twice about what they absorb on a daily basis.

Sontag’s term ‘Image Junkies’ has been a significant influence in my recent work. Sontag claims that one of the defining characteristics of 1970’s culture was the commercial drive to stockpile photographs of every imaginable subject. The photograph then became a replacement for an experience. You can show an old family photograph to a friend, point out people in the photograph, tell the story surrounding it, and it becomes an experience in itself, perhaps making it unnecessary to have witnessed the moment in the first place. We have since become, as Sontag states, ‘Image Junkies’; obsessed with a compulsion to photograph everything around us, the people we meet, the food we eat and the places we visit. We have a culture where there is a sea of information and this raises lots of issues and problems, of course this has lots of scope for making work.

http://vimeo.com/92233752

How did you develop the idea that produced your final exhibition work?

The idea for my exhibition piece came from my dissertation. Previously I was looking at nostalgia and memories surrounding family photography and the reasons behind them. Whilst writing my dissertation I begun to bring these ideas into the context of none object images that exist on a screen in cyberspace and how they are consumed on social media sites.

I decided that the way I wanted to show these images was to break them down and corrupt them into a basic form. For this I had to learn how to read and write hexadecimal code. I taught myself to write images from scratch pixel by pixel which was certainly challenging! Though by doing so I understood how to corrupt imagery in the way I wanted to and using code that is part of the digital seemed to be important, rather than just manipulating the image sin Photoshop. I put this into practice by creating a newspaper made up entirely of corrupted imagery for the degree show, and also a radio news broadcast that was also corrupted.

What do you think is the most significant thing that has helped you during your time a UCA Farnham?

The resources and staff have helped me the most, having a wide range of tutors to discuss and bounce ideas off in tutorials has helped me significantly. I wouldn't have been able to achieve half the pieces I've produced in the past three years without the wide range of facilities and resources.

What did you learn from the process of producing your Farnham exhibition?

Working under pressure! Having a time limit for an installation set up was new to me and I really struggled with getting it done in time.

What are you planning next?

I want to be close to a creative hub, work with some small galleries and I have a job working in arts education, so I will also keep making work.

http://steph.pro/