PSAD Diploma 2020 Exhibition
This exhibition provides a focus for the conclusion of the two-year Diploma in Art and Design from six students attending the Putney School of Art and Design. The works displayed use mixed media, sculpture & conceptual art to explore a variety of themes.
All students have individually chosen their subject matter to create personal statements which explore common themes of memory, identity, and place. Despite widely varying starting points and materials, and working in near isolation, each has questioned ‘what we might not know’. What can’t we know about what lies under our feet? What memories do we have of places, people that have gone? How well do we know ourselves and our homes?
Linda Breeds
Linda Breeds traces ancestral remembrance through the exploration of the Hastings and New York landscape and the use of mixed-media collage, cyanotype and paint. Her practice is concerned with themes of time and passage and the use of historic and visual research.
Katie Inness-Chaytor
For my Final Major Project, I have taken as my starting point the public memorialization of death using spontaneous shrines, particularly the use of flowers. I have explored this using the collagraph technique with Intaglio ink. Due to the absence of a printing press during lockdown they have all been hand-printed using a Baren.
Steve Mathews
Earthy Fascination
Mathews spends a lot of time in the natural world during daily walks or conservation work. This slow paced, direct experience has led to an appreciation of the smaller, less obvious aspects of nature, some in plain sight and overlooked or simply unseen. In this exhibition he hopes the “magical ways” of nature are revealed for their greater wonder. His work makes use of ‘low material’ such as packaging (cardboard, polystyrene) which is all around, but we give it very little attention – echoing the theme of overlooked or unseen aspects of our natural world. This discarded material makes it a great medium for experimentation. Transmutation of both the material and perception is of interest to Mathews as it allows him to explore his interest in abstraction to create visual installations.
Felicity Ross
JOURNEYS TO VANISHED PLACES
I capture the feelings evoked by archaeological fragments and ancient buildings, which afford me shards of a view into the vanished world of the past. When I first see an age-old item, just for a second I can breathe the same air as the people who made that sculpture, sailed in those boats, lost their jewellery, cast their spells. My linocuts and paper collages allude to he disorienting experience of discovering that places I once knew have disappeared into history. I feel as if I could still find them, if only I could find the right corner to turn.
Clive Thomas
My work concentrates on sculptural forms. I have created a series of images in the form of masks, using the faces of real people. I have asked each of them to name their spiritual animal and these have been created as complete heads of each chosen animal. My Artist’s Book also uses masks, although they are cast not sculpted. I have taken a quotation from T.S. Elliot’s “Four Quartets” and written it around images of the cast faces. The quotation is circular in meaning and this is reflected in the way it’s written and the masks are hung.
Hannah Weaver
HOME: FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY
Hannah Weaver has chosen to explore the themes of home and memory, taking inspiration from the collections of the Victorian era. Her ‘Cabinet of Memories’ was created by engaging family and friends to identify objects with personal meaning.
The assemblage features a display of various everyday objects chosen from the ‘Cabinet of Memories’. Cast from plaster, these memories have been transformed into uncanny sculptural forms, displayed within Victorian glass collector’s domes.
Photographs are used to highlight everyday objects in images that have been inspired by memories from Hannah’s favourite childhood fairy stories.
