38 Degrees

The breadth and diversity of work featured in this online catalogue shows the range of practices, skills and contexts explored by the thirty eight artists and designers graduating from the BA Visual Arts course this year.

Each student has developed their own particular language, set of skills and methodologies in order to explore ideas and articulate thoughts, concerns and impressions of the world around them. Whilst the degree show may seem like a final point, the end of something, we hope that for all our students it is just the beginning, a public pause before they move into the world outside university and onto a myriad of new challenges and opportunities.

We congratulate them on their achievements, wish them all good luck for the future and hope that you find the work here engaging, thought provoking and inspiring.

Ruth Claxton, on behalf of the BA Visual Arts Staff team.

BA Visual Arts (by Negotiated Study) Degree Show 2009
Open Saturday 13th June 10-6, Monday 15th – Saturday 20th June 10-5
Launch Event Monday 15th June 6-8

School of Art Bournville, Birmingham City University, Maple Road, B30 2AA
tel : 0121 3315775
www.schoolofartbournville.com
www.biad.bcu.ac.uk
http://thirty-eight-degrees.blogspot.com/

• Dan Auluk
• Frances Bonner
• Ed Barratt-Bournier
• Angie Burman
• Danni Chauhan
• Di Cope

As a visual artist my work centres on the appropriation and deconstruction of feature films. This includes the digitally editing and manipulation of the original directly off DVD. The films chosen are selected to further examine specific aspects of film production including cinematography, narrative structure, thematic content, screenplay and soundtrack. The work exists in a gallery installation setting and explores the interplay between moving image, photography, text and sound.

The film I have chosen to work with is the short film La Jetee, directed by Chris Marker, which is a film about time travel set in a post-apocalyptic future.

I was attracted to La Jetee for it’s unique construction of storytelling technique. The film itself is constructed from a montage of static black and white photographic stills with a sparse overlay of a voice over narration. Interestingly there is a brief sequence in the film that is moving image and this contradiction became an initial trigger for my work.

The work presented explores notions of past and present, memory and place, montage and movement set within the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia, which is inherent within the thematic content of La Jetee.

My work is centered around a particular train journey which became very repetitive and, as I soon came to realise, instilled many emotions within me. Through the medium of paint I have aimed to capture these emotions on canvas, expressing myself with movement and colour.

My project is called Brutalist Utopia reflecting the idea of these buildings which were built in the period after the Second World War, creating huge structures in which the tenants could all live equally and share a great community sprit. Ideas developed from a communist ideology where every one is equal with equal space. I have travelled round the country withy my Nikon D80, capturing buildings built in the 1950’s and1960’s, in particular the work of the forerunners and founders of the Brutalist style; Le Corbusier, Peter and Alison Smithson, Denys Lasdun and John Madin. By capturing them in this way I aim to glorify the buildings and make them shine for the hard, complex structures they are.

The focus of my work as a designer is working with textiles and mixed media, creating 3D soft figure characters.

One particular character, Whisper The Listening Bear was designed and created after extensive research with therapists and teachers. During trials Whisper helped one little girl to speak about her abuse after professionals had been unsuccessful in doing so during the two years they had been counselling her. This was a major break through for them and for me as a designer.

A significant part of my practice has been dedicated to children. This has not only involved my designing and creating Whisper The Listening Bear, but writing and illustrating his first children’s picture story book. Making a “difference” and a positive contribution to the lives of children is so important to me and I look forward to developing and progressing these themes in the future.

I specialise in Fashion Styling and Fashion Photography. In 2007/8 I gained a qualification in Hairdressing (Levels 1 & 2) and a certificate in Cosmetic Make up which gave me strong practical knowledge to combine with design skills and creative thinking within my styling work. Hair and make up has always interested me both personally and professionally.

Studying Art and Design at BCU has been a motivating experience and I have managed to improve and develop my skills and ideas. During the second year of my degree I worked within the fashion industry for Doll, a London based Fashion events company who organise catwalk shows and exhibitions. The work included front of house duties and I also worked backstage as a dresser for the catwalk shows. Since my initial placement in February 2008 with Doll, I had been invited back and have been a dresser for the LK Today High Street Fashion awards and Gucci Trunk. As I know I want to carry on my profession as a hair and makeup stylist, I applied and have been accepted at the London College of Fashion for the hair and makeup styling course.

When I consider nature’s tireless insistence to reclaim surfaces with minute organic intricacies such as lichen and algae, I am filled with respect for its ingenuity to colonise. My large-scale, collaged drawings are a response to my sense of sublime awe when I also consider the vastness of landscape comprising this detail.
I begin by selecting my own macro-lens photographs scattered randomly across the surface, colonising the area as nature would. Cropped out of their square format into elipse shapes they become a new points of reference and invite my gestural response to draw out of them across the paper with water colour washes and fine-line pen. With this process I aim to question the traditional expectations of representation and continue to extend the boundaries of the drawing as a medium, in a similar way to the work of Julie Mehretu. ‘Drawn from photographs’ could describe how the work is created, but this also implies an intention of trying to capture photographic likeness. In my drawing I actually try to extract the vital impulses emanating from the cropped photographs and so express an abstract, virtual landscape.

• Oscar Cass-Darweish
• Charlotte Davies
• Leanne Davies
• Maddy Dickerson
• Jenni Dixon
• Ben Douglas
• Gene-George Earle
• Emma Eaves
• Julie Eley
• Adam Green

As a digital practitioner I work with concepts of virtual space in differing contexts, including the internet, gallery installations and site based projects. The relevance of remapping existing spaces and relocation of virtual models into ‘real’ spaces is explored with an emphasis on architectural environments. The work aims to play on longstanding human anxieties around uncanny architectural spaces, surveillance cameras and potential ‘consciousness’ of digital technology. The continual relocation and appropriation of work between real and virtual situations is an important factor in the organic process of developing a correlated series of environments.

I am 22 year old Female who has a passion for design, horses, music and literature. I am working towards a career as an Art Director in the creative industry of Advertising.

I have always been intrigued by the power which the terms ‘beauty’ and ‘glamour’ posess within our cosmetic culture, whereby appearance is said to be the key to wealth, success and happiness. The concept that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is what ultimately drives my work. Social construction tells us what we should recognize as either beautiful or ugly, but often these lines become blurred within the human psyche, specifically in terms of the quick fix of extreme cosmetic and plastic surgery.

The aim of my work is to create a conflicting sense of both the glamorous and the ultimately grotesque. By working directly with individuals burdened with facial and bodily disfigurement I am able to challenge the feeling of repulsion by using the beauty of the gloss paint, intense colour and complex technique to compel viewers to continue observing the work. By doing so the work aims to evoke a deep emotional response within the individual, a response that can not possibly be identified while the sense of glamour and the grotesque remain in constant battle with one another.

A society’s view upon the social ideal amazes me, and it is the questioning of such views that continue to drive the ideas within my practice.

My work for the degree show is based around the idea of interaction with the viewer. I’m interested in involving people in my work, making work that makes the audience interact with it. As I’m from a street art background I have always made work that craves the audiences interaction, whether it be a positive or negative one, the work almost doesn’t exist without the audience’s interaction.

More recently I have been working with performance art, creating art that the audience automatically are a part of without there permission, much like the concept of street art.

Robin Rhode - one of the main influences for my performance pieces worked his earlier performances in a similar vein, turning up in the gallery space and making the art there and then on the launch event of the show, completely baffling and confusing people as to what’s going on.

I feel there’s some political undertones in this idea which I find very interesting, I think anything done without permission is a political gesture. Challenging what the gallery space is and how work should look / act in the space is something I always try to do, I like to go against traditional gallery concepts, But when it becomes too obviously political I think it looses some of its power.

As I’m working with a large space for the show I’ve decided to work to small scale, taking a more minimal approach and positioning the works unethically on the wall – again challenging the gallery space. Within the piece I am breaking down text simply into ‘mark making’, translating text into imagery.

My work focuses around the verb “to noth” which was created by myself along with its dictionary definition. When a verb is used with the ‘ing’ on the end, it is being used in action form, which asserts it as a process. I also use other verbs, also in action form as references for anthropological studies. Some verbs that I have explored are wishing, hoping and being, though the list of possibilities is vast. What I am doing is nothing, but in verb form, and as a process which is created by turning it into a verb, becomes something different. My work questions rules and invents new ones. I look at how formless ideas and concepts are shaped to create meaning, and as a creation, become a narrative, a fiction. My explorations are open-ended with no attempt for definitions, but look at how people feel the urge to define. By using invented, found and non-existent objects, I defy interpretation and formation of meaning. I try to illustrate the propensity for over-interpretation, but with a light hearted approach. My practice is fed with ideas and concepts sourced from philosophy, literature, cinema and music. I mainly use installation to finalise a wide exploration of ideas, though I use a variety of visual languages to form my practice.

We are a collaborative duo of digital fantasy artists. We work predominantly in digital media such as Adobe Photoshop, using high spec PCs and Wacom Graphics Tablets to produce fantasy and sci-fi illustrations. These illustrations describe many subjects from action and adventure to picturesque landscapes and scenery while focusing on two main characters that tie everything together. It is our goal to one day put our illustration skills to work in the video game industry and in future set up our own business in outsourcing illustration and concept art as a studio. We both have our own individual artist websites at www.bendouglasart.com and www.rochelleridgwell.com .

I have explored the visual aspects that relate to the relationship between the female form and product promotion. I have captured the semi naked female form that is portrayed in stereotypical formats seen in certain soft pornography magazines such Nuts and Zoo. The glamour models that are portrayed in these magazines are simply a device that sells this type of publication, reducing women to a sexual object and using them as a way to attract their target group which is predominantly male. These publications tend to show women in almost standardized poses which  tend to show them as alluring male fantasies. I have used a variety of glamour models within my artwork. By using acrylic and various glossy paints I have been able to represent the glossy pages from certain soft pornography magazines. Within my work I have produced a series of stylized sirens that conform to the artificial fixations of female beauty.

My work is strongly influenced by the Tibetan Culture.  Having lived and worked there for many years I want to keep alive the memories I have of Tibet.  In the landscape distinctive and brightly coloured prayer flags can be seen everywhere. These are uniquely Tibetan and I have chosen to make a flag installation in Bournville to communicate and act as a vehicle to convey my Tibetan memories.
I have used snippets of photographs, fragmented memories, from which to draw designs for the flags.  These designs have then been silk-screen printed onto hand-dyed muslin cloth in colours representing the Tibetan elements. I have also appliquéd some of the designs and then printed them. I wanted to emulate the old Tibetan art masters who often used appliqué when working on the cloth paintings, or thangkas.
The fabrics used to decorate the flag pole were bought in the bazaars of Tibet or given to me by Tibetan friends. These found fabrics also produce a vibrant memory.
A temporary installation was also installed on the Lickey Hills near Birmingham in April 2009. This version was twenty four feet high with over 700 flags stretching out into the landscape.

Made in response to the adolescent memories of a repressed sexuality, my work attempts to make present what was previously absent. The manipulated image seeks to clarify impressions of my identity as perceived by family members during these formative years when my public façade masked a personal isolation. Evolved from a series of experiments, there is no chronological sequence to the spent narrative that depicts my internal experience.

• Lynne Jones
• Alison Knapp
• Megan King

Influenced by the literature of JG Ballard, my work explores the correlation between fact and fiction, and the relationship between a 19th Century vision of utopia and its subsequent contemporary dystopia. Through photography and video I present allegories of gang associated crime and disorder within a South Birmingham Community. A non fictional narrative seeks to convey a dismissed truth.

The need for shelter is an atavistic instinct – a primary drive which is fundamental for security. My work explores the personal shelter which we derive from the fashion and architecture we create around us. We use these shelters to enclose and protect ourselves from the extremities of the elements – cold, wind, rain. My installation work is a dichotomy – the stereotypic concept of a dress: beautiful, ephemeral and delicate, becomes an unyielding structure, roughened and slatted, and of immutable strength.

I have explored a stepped progression, leading from the discipline of fashion to the discipline of architecture – from a dress of fabric to a shelter of wood. My installation work comprises the two intermediate states between these disciplines.
My inspiration for these pieces originated from the Skin + Bones exhibition, which explored the parallel practices of fashion and architecture in their techniques of construction.

I am also influenced by Do-Ho Suh who perceives the crafts of sewing and dressmaking as related to architecture:

“When you expand this idea of clothing as a space, it becomes an inhabitable structure,
a building, a house made of fabric” ~ Do-Ho Suh*

*Taken from: COLLINS, J. ‘Sculpture Today’ (2007) London: Phaidon Press. p.306.

My work explores how personal life experiences from childhood, through adolescence, into adulthood have instilled negative connotations of being overweight and obese in my mind. These experiences include growing up with elder sisters that gradually became overweight, then obese, combined with pressure from my older generation of relatives to maintain a slim and healthy figure. It is only since reaching adulthood and being removed from the family environment that I have realised the full impact this has had.

Through my work I am releasing these pent-up feelings and emotions by expressing the fear I have of becoming overweight as well as the concern that obesity is being accepted as ‘the norm’ throughout society today. During the direct body casting of overweight family members using material such as plaster and latex, I have discovered new ways of expressing my inner feelings and emotions.

• Keeley Lowe
• Louise Mackuin
• Theresa McCulluch
• Karen Mclean
• Andrew Murray

I work with a variety of media in order to create multidisciplinary installations that explore the dimensions and boundaries of physical and illusionary space.

My experimental practice is driven by the concept of the binary opposition which is engendered by the western propensity to organize everything into a hierarchical structure. Essentially, it is the desire for a centre that drives the opposition’s; male/female, inside/outside, reductive/expansive that resonate, amongst others, throughout my work. A play on such dichotonomies is expressed through sculpture, video, photography and sound. My installations seek to break through and go beyond architectural space, encouraging ideas of the human potential to go beyond what is already known.

An audience may interact with the work by encountering it from various vantage points which encourage the investigation needed to discover and reveal hidden worlds.

The lens is a barrier that forever separates us, the audience, from them, the subjects of our voyeuristic gaze. We gaze upon the actions of others, into a private world, as images form to create the illusion of movement, the illusion of reality. Cinema imitating reality, and reality, on occasion, appearing filmic.

My work focuses on the reflexive nature of the relationship between observer and objectified subject blurring distinctions between the seer and the seen. I work with video installation depicting fragmented intimate images, affecting the viewer, encouraged to mentally piece together scenes in a relational correspondence between the filmic body and the viewer’s physical body. I draw on film language of editing, shot types, camera angle and viewpoint as tools to seduce the observer into a succession of supposed private final moments. Performance invites the viewer into the stillness to feel the eyes control. Who has the power?

My practice is supported with concepts taken from psychoanalysis, philosophy, film theory and ideas regarding the human condition.

My work looks into exaggerated styles and fashions and using still photography explores how one person can depict themselves through different make-up and hair designs.

From being inspired by the life, work and play of a drag queen, I decided to focus on their facial appearance itself and highlight the features that best brought out their personality and style. By using black and white images and just highlighting the exaggerated and bold make-up designs in colour it shows the beauty being captured and gives the image more emotional power.

In my practice I have been concerned with post colonial issues. Of particular interest in my final presentation are the resonant characteristics of colonialism that continue to operate in covert subtle ways, and the historical reasons behind their formations. As I originate from the Caribbean I have been interested in our connected histories.

Bournville, developed by George Cadbury at the end of the 19th century has its place in history, being famously known for Cadbury’s philanthropic approach to employment and labour conditions. However my research reveals that the site is related to a wider network of colonial trade that connects it to the cocoa plantations of Trinidad, where women and men were used as indentures in a system that differed little from slavery.

Connecting these often occluded histories of labour, race and exploitation has enabled me to confront complexities of the past and address issues of identity, displacement and racism

My work is concerned with themes of psychological self-realisation and with objectified boundaries of identity; the representation incorporates elements of self-portraiture with visual sense of the extended bodily self-identity by having the space integrated into the body of a work. Also the incomplete, disrupted anthropomorphism of the figure outlines bleeding into their surroundings, is intended to reanalyse psychological barriers, particularly unchanging self containment

The central influence: Freud, The Ego and the id. (The skin ego) ‘The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body.’

Jen Doy’s book, Picturing the Self says, ‘The skin is both inside and outside the body, a sort of envelope for it, an interface between the self and others, between private and public sensations.’ Specifically I am interested in emotional sensations such as isolation, disassociation, personal displacement, disjointed adolescence awkwardness. My imagery, drawn from personal emotional experience acts as a therapeutic attempt at expresion through emotional realism.

My goal is to turn a comprehensive vivid collage of personally derived emotions into redefining or reaffirming stable, coherent sensations of identity

• Palminder Rai
• Rochelle Ridgewell
• Sayma Shahid
• Balkar Shoker

My work revolves around social gatherings such as Indian culture, religion, football, music and dance. My intention is to communicate feelings of joy, happiness and the physicality of movement through the medium of digital painting. My finished works are created through my personal instinctive response to sound and imagery. I feel that painting in itself is not enough.

I utilise various media from photography, video and sound capture The work operates photographically the audio recordings give the viewer a more immersive sense of the euphoria that I personally felt. My work is a reactionary response to these experiences and I have explored this with physical mark making digital manipulation techniques.
Influences are artists such as Joan Miro, Jackson Pollock and the Singh twins alongside musical influences such as Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, and Bollywood musicals. In my search for contemporary experimental sound composers, I discovered that John Cage is also influenced by everyday sounds such as traffic and the city in a similar way to me. Ambient sounds derived from crowds, traffic and vortex of aircraft are all around us at different times in our lives.

My work is based around the concepts of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) wherein people are obliged to perform rituals, such as wash the hands and make checks. Being an OCD myself, I have produced work around my personal understanding of the illness.

My work began with the intention of discovering alternative ways to assist the OCD sufferer to cope with obsessions. This may have involved changing something significant in life, in the light that they would be able to adapt to an easier living. With the influence of ‘change’ along with interests in gadgetry, I have been able to design/appropriate graphical products for the use of OCD sufferers.

In using a light-hearted tone and mocking text, I have created an array of two- dimensional objects, some of which are possible to construct. Presented in a catalogue in an installation, my intention is to introduce a new ‘brand’ of unique products. Unlike Betterware and Innovations catalogues, the products exist only on paper to question whether they should exist; parallel to questioning whether OCD exists. I have also questioned whether these products will actually aid the OCD sufferer or simply work as contraptions, becoming obsessions themselves, as though tangibles form of OCD.

Culture has always been an interesting subject for me, coming from a multicultural home environment, with various faiths mixed together, made my life always full of interesting and extraordinary things. I also love travelling and exploring different parts of the world and having a great deal of friends and family abroad always meant that I could explore those things I have always enjoyed.
Though painting has always held a special place in my heart, I have always tried to understand how things work, and the structure of things, and painting for me has always been a way for me to try and capture the world on canvas. Taking a small sketch book and pencil has as well as a camera is always one of those things I have always done.

The following paintings are slightly controversial, touching on themes we don’t always want to talk about, like 9/11, and how cultures have different views, and how sometimes cultures interact. There are many beautiful things, society is truly a melting pot of many cultures from over the world, but there seems to be some ambivalence, and it seems like today’s world events, have also created a sense of fear.

• Nita Walters
• Adele West
• Gill Whitting
• Peter Wykes

As an artist, my interests lie within the relationship between my own personal experiences of neighbourhood and that of my neighbours. My experimental audiovisual pieces tie into the perception of place, memory, personal boundaries and its psychological effect on the self.

Although my current work is bordering on social documentary and anecdote, the act of obtaining interviews through personal intervention is as important as the work itself as I attempt to translate my experiences from my own artistic standpoint within an installation context.

My interventions have led me to collecting digital subjective anecdotal accounts from strangers who pass me from person to person. From these interviews I translate the essence of feeling regarding my experiences of this process through audio and various media. The act of obtaining these interviews has affected how I see my neighbourhood and its openness to exploration within communities that I see as becoming more and more disparate at street level.

These childlike figures best suit the name of the ‘frrh people’, these figures are representations of my inner being I guess you can say it is my inner child, that appears in this form, they re-enact either what I am doing at that moment in time.

They represent that which stays forever young, the inner child within that still holds onto its innocence, the part of us which at times can seem lost and alone, frozen in time as the world moves on without it, that part of us that feels left behind, that stands to the side, unsure what to do, not wanting to join the others, ‘to grow up’, to become a mindless drone.

I have chosen to arrange my show in this way as I believe that it depicts all of the aspects of the Frrh people, just as they represent ghosts of the past, faded memories of a lost childhood, of that part of us that has captured eternal youth by never growing up.

The Frrh’s are the embodiment of those different aspects, they are idols to help us remember, to awaken forgotten memories of moments long since past.

My art practice records and represents economic and social change. My current work explores the impact of the global crisis through an archive depicting the demise of Woolworths.

Woolworths went bankrupt in December 2008 with the closure of all 807 UK stores and loss of 30,000 jobs. In spite of being a global brand, starting in America in 1879 and evolving in the UK over 100 years, the plug was pulled and staff made redundant with 10 days notice. High Street locations have always been a feature of Woolworths and its end impacts dramatically on the High Street – the 12 stores in Birmingham, now pillaged, abandoned empty shells. Data also illustrate how the shut-down has contributed to Birmingham’s unemployment problems and the challenge to local job centres, themselves heavily branded and visually prominent. Woolworths was also global in another sense: serving local communities and families – aiming to be “classless” - with a vast, inexpensive product range.

Recalling Woolworths is not about sentimentality: it is about a brand referencing globalisation and immense social transformation - across two world wars, the 60s social revolution, turmoil of the Thatcher years and radical changes in consumer preferences, fashions, art and design and retail markets.

Light is elemental, linked to the ability to see.

Within the genre of photography, my work is about the inter-relationship between vision, light, interpretation and recognition. This series of photographs represent the final stages of a continuing project.
In this body of work, the original subject has become almost incidental, but the light has been used to create a variety (or range) of images, that have been left for the viewer to interpret in their own way.

The photographs were mostly taken in an urban interior or an exterior space using extended exposure, whose after-effects rendered images that were ethereal in their quality and became removed from the original identification of the subject. They also produced colours that varied between the bold and dramatic as well as those that were more subdued and calming. These images now allow the viewer to apply their own interpretations of the forms, colours and space to make their own associations and identify the subjects in their own way.

My works have been both deliberate and accidental in their design, created with the intention of resembling a real environment.