Graduate Show Blog.
It is typical that the first time I have actual time to sit down and write this blog, that isn’t 2 am my laptop charger breaks, I lose my bank card and smash my phone screen.
woo, go technology!!
I’m hoping things just come in three’s and this is as bad as it gets for now and that karma kicks in soon and I get three great things happen… fingers are crossed for a new job with a future comes along!!
So, with the takedown of my graduate exhibition having happened a week ago now, I actually sit down and write this (new laptop charger with a slow laptop grr). Anyway, I thought I should write something on my grad show.
If you didn’t know I studied fine art painting at the at the university of Brighton and at the end of any art or design based course you put on an end of year show. In my case this was around 60% of the final degree...no pressure. So I guess this post is about how that all went down in the end.
You start the year with the prospect of third year wondering who’s going to crack first praying it’s not you so you don’t look the complete crazy one.
As a group you talk about the degree show but know you have to get through semester 1 first. You have a dissertation 18% and a studio assessment 22% so you just do a bit of fundraising – bake sales galore.
Christmas and New year’s come, you don’t enjoy yourself the way you should because your dissertation is in the week you come back.
You hand your dissertation in and take a sigh of relief, celebrate with drinks and food thinking the worst must be over. Right? I mean we’re painters, writing is the tricky bit and that’s done with now, so it must get easier. Right?
NO!
It starts out a bit calmer because you can dedicate so much more time to painting, the bit you like. This wears off after about a week when you realise your practice isn’t anywhere near developed to the point it should be.
So you spend your time looking at others, wondering why they look so much calmer than you, in reality, they think the same of you.
You have your tutors over the next few months try to help but are really twats who don’t understand you and your artwork – resorting into some angsty painter attitude, which is not helpful.
In amongst this you juggle your 20hour a week job, maybe a social life, sleep, eating and prepping the degree show. Small arguments arise over catalogue colour, whose turn is it to sit on the cake stall if you’re on the social media enough. We all know we’re only arguing because we are stressed from lack of sleep.
You manage.
Your tutors call you stupid. Don’t encourage your ideas or thoughts, argue like divorcing parents to the point you literally have no idea who you are anymore. – maybe bar work is for me, not art, bar work!!
Then Easter crops up.
Three blissful weeks with no tutors and fewer people in the studios. For me at least, this is when my painting really came to life and made sense.
I had no tutors telling me what was right or wrong and no tutors arguing like parents.
There was no unnecessary music in the studios, no random loud talking and laughing.
My tutors had nothing nasty to say anymore because with only 2 weeks left what good would it do!
Yeah! Fuck You!
Then we had to begin the end!!
Moving our work and equipment out the studios, taking down the studios and turning them into respectable white-walled exhibition space.
This was three weeks of stress in themselves...trying to coordinate walls being taken down and moved, scary business when your 5”1 like me.
It happened. Smoothly and quickly!
Go class of 2016!
I think we all pretty much worked as a team all the way through, I was so impressed, so were our tutors by the sounds of things.
We had two weeks of waiting while the tutors then went round and judged us, deciding our fate from three years of tears, tantrums, alcohol, growing, falling, growing, laughter, bad times and good times. All of that came down to this final moment, rounded off by a busy opening night, fuelled with more alcohol and laughter and nerves.
I talk as if that is the end. This is the thing with uni, is that it has multiple endings. The next one was the taking down of the exhibition which for advice to anyone, don’t go in after a night out where you stopped drinking only a couple hours before because people will remember you as a mess.
Life was meant to get easier!!
And that not even the end, I get my results next week and then graduation ceremony in a month so still got two more endings to go!
The only good thing about this is that I can blag being a student for just a little bit longer.
Fuck you council tax!!
This last semester at uni I have thought of it nothing but stress and completely pointless, why put yourself through and now being in the middle of the other side, I think it was fun, it was great (potentially will change when I get my grade) but I am happier I did it now, I understand more what I want my art to be and how I want to be. The change in me as a person is significant and I feel a better person than when I started but here’s the funny thing about life, moving to Brighton and doing my degree was meant to be the start of my life, now left uni applying for jobs, this is the new start to my life and I’m now realising that there is probably going to be multiple starts to my life, new stages or chapters – like the multiple endings of uni.
I look forward to this because as Chris Stevens (head of my course) repeated to us this year “Your grade doesn’t matter, you can leave uni and go out into the world far more emotionally developed people than others because you studied art and that’s more important than a 1st. And when life gets hard and stressful, feed the seagulls. Just feed the seagulls” Stevens, Chris, 2016, Brighton. (still can’t reference)
Again, this does not end the uni blogging as I still have to get my results and graduate!!
(You can tell I ended up writing most of this at 3am)
