OCA preloader logo
Mature students stand out - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

Mature students stand out thumb

Mature students stand out

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
photo (26)My colleague Alison Churchill and I went to see this year’s Creative Spark degree show at Sheffield Hallam University last week.  What struck us was that overall the quality of the work was higher than the previous year, mainly because, we thought, there was more emphasis on ‘well made’ art and good presentation. One or two students’ work stood out because of their creativity. Interestingly, the best work we saw was produced by mature students.  Toni Buckby fits this bill.  She did a lot of menial labour on low pay as well as commercial embroidery before joining the art degree at Hallam.  Her final project (Shirt 2013) was a performance: deconstructing a £4 Primark shirt, and producing a copy, hand sewn.  She emulates the working conditions used in the original manufacture and begs questions about pay, value and craft in manufacture.  Thought provoking, and clever. Another mature student whose work impressed was Colin Morton, who is an ex steel factory worker.  His final work is entitled When I Look Back. Its a striking animation, which I caught a bit of on my iPhone (so the quality is not brilliant and the clip I did is only a few seconds long), housed in a little factory building. It caught my eye and drew me in.   photo (25)Finally there was Gareth Bunting’s large drawing A Voyage to Kathmandu, (I don’t know how old he is, I suspect he’s a young man) which consisted of two huge sheets of Fabriano paper joined together, with some fascinating drawings of ordinary human and animal life in Nepal, with the backdrop of dramatic mountains.  The drawings beg you in to look at the detail with the inventive juxtaposition of stories, but also encourage you to step back to get a bird’s eye view of the whole country. It did make me wonder about how to encourage OCA students to try working on big drawings, and ways to deliver such pieces for assessment?  Such a drawing would have to be delivered in a tube.


Posted by author: Jane Parry

3 thoughts on “Mature students stand out

  • Love Gareth Buntings drawing. It reminds me of a screen we had when I was small, covered in £Edwardian newspaper cuttings and a great source of stories.I think he must be young, you would need good knees or a good head for heights to cover that paper, and lots of space {you say it is big]. Would it fit into an ordinary house? The drawing looks good.Would like to have seenit. Fascinating

  • These look and sound like really interesting pieces. At the Edinburgh College of Art Degree Shows I was very impressed with the room that showed students graduating with a BA in Combined Arts Studies. This is the part time degree that has now, sadly, been axed with the merger with Edinburgh University. Those who started on it can continue, but no more students are being accepted. Like the OCA, it attracts older students. They have seven years to complete their degree. The work was every bit as contemporary as the full time degree work, but looked better made and more considered. It was aware of current trends without being seduced by them. So, there is something to be said about having work/ life experience beforehand and studying art alongside other commitments. There is a richer seam to mine.

    • Great examples Jane and Alison. I’ve seen some good small scale animated drawing installations in the last year – the student winner at Jerwood 2012, the winner in 2013 and the Tallin Drawing Triennial. There’s a fantastically complex large city scape at the Japanese Outsider Art exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London. If you’re interested in focussed and obsessive practice with simple materials try and see the show before 30th June. There are videos of people working on the website. I was a student at Sheffield Hallam in the 1990s and I noticed that most of the mature students put in longer hours than those who had just left home. I think they knew what a privilege it was to study with all the support that art college offers and they weren’t going to waste any of it. Ideas don’t come out of nowhere, you have to regularly make stuff to generate good ones.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to blog listings