University of Chester Art and Design Degree Show 2023
Words, Hannah Harry
Pictures, Chris Millward
The excitement of a degree show is seeing the potential of emerging talent and not only appreciating works but allowing them to become an imaginative cornerstone for assessing an individual’s artistic future. There is plenty of work at the University of Chester’s Art and Design degree show to feel excited about and a lot to look forward to.
Across the disciplines of Fine Art, Photography, Fashion and Design, there is a plethora of work, reflecting the talents of a group of graduates about to embark on their artistic careers, from conceptual installations to pictorial canvases and brief-led design projects.
Chris Bunn’s swirling, emotive oil paintings use bright juxtapositions of colour and thick impasto to explore the relationship between concepts of representation and abstraction. His subject matter is musicians and the energy of his colours and marks function as visual equivalents for the music being played by his band of drummers, bassists, guitarists and saxophonists. Like Kandinsky’s synesthetic canvases, Bunn’s work seeks to stimulate the same transformative effect of hearing music on the human soul.
Tanya Tranter’s work is similarly emotive, though in a different vein; her portraits explore the tension between the physical reality of child-rearing and the politicisation of parenthood. Cut-outs of advice from a child-rearing manual, layered over a nude self-portrait, showing an exhausted lactating mother on her mobile device, emphasise the emotional and physical toll of modernity – its economic, cultural and technological expectations – on parenthood. In another, Tranter uses facture to convey emotion – fluorescent paint, resembling vomit, be-smatters a monochrome portrait of the artist, her face just visible against a colourful patchwork cloth of paint.
Two installations by Jack Boutet use reclaimed and manufactured materials alongside organic forms to explore ideas about human presence within the landscape. Sheep skulls, moss, old bottles and rusted ephemera are enclosed, in one piece, within a network of lines made from blue plastic and presided over by a Bush television monitor. The visual juxtaposition of the organic and the synthetic is striking and raises questions about the categorisation of natural and unnatural and humans’ place within this categorisation.
While Fine Art pieces are displayed here as completed and stand-alone works, student projects from the Product Design programme present inventive final products alongside portfolios documenting the journey of the designer from initial concept onwards. Prototypes and manuals documenting the creative journey are exhibited side-by-side, providing exciting insights into the design process.
Emily Catterall’s project ‘Be Outside Again’ demonstrates the phases involved in the design journey inspired by a brief to bring together adults and children in an outdoor environment. Catterall’s final product is a wooden planter featuring space for storing tools, displaying plants and encouraging adults and children to garden together in an almost hut-like enclosure. Seeing Catterall’s final project alongside earlier miniature prototypes and a design journal has the exciting effect of allowing the real-world application of design to unfold before the viewer’s eyes.
A similarly exciting sense of design’s potential to transform reality is conveyed by the work of students from the Interior Design programme. Working from briefs to transform disused sites around Chester city centre, projects by Amy Livingston and Ffion Jones stand out for the potential of creative thinking to impact communities and change real lives. ‘The Green Collective’ and ‘Common Ground’ propose re-imaginings of traditional community centres as green spaces which nurture the health, wellbeing and creative imagination of users, benefiting the entire community.
Graphic Design student Sam Clibery has used laser cutting, 3D printing, epoxy resin casting, plaster, paint and inket printing to create a board game-style display exploring conflict within relationships. Using 3D typography, Clibery has created prototypes of word-sculptures projected across a street-map of Chester city centre, which mirror the language of an argumentative couple: the word ‘cold’ is imagined within a series of ice-cubes, ‘embarrassed’ is laser cut out of a ‘pool’ of resin ‘wine’ emanating from a knocked-over glass, while ‘immature’ is spelt out in a series of children’s building blocks. The viewer is able at once to see the 3D words as they stand on the board and to imagine them as large-scale sculptures around the city centre, drawing attention to the complexities of couples’ communication strategies.
The installation, with its emphasis on three-dimensional text, touches on the theme of physicality examined by Izzy Wedgwood in her collection of family photograph albums and personal ephemera. Taking inspiration from Victorian scrapbooks, Wedgwood chose to focus on and display the physical nature of old photographs, as distinct from digital work, drawing attention to the link between personal documents and historical artefacts. Emphasis is placed on the ability to touch and feel in an experience that transcends the merely visual.
Each of these works are documented in a free and clearly-presented exhibition catalogue, alongside the remaining exhibition pieces – there are far too many to cover even a fraction of what is on offer in a single review. Across all programmes there are examples of creativity that promise an exciting future for art and design in the North West.
The University of Chester Art and Design Degree Show runs until 30 June
Words, Hannah Harry
Pictures, Chris Millward