Final Show

The Final Show at Queens Road previewed on Friday night, and then ran until Tuesday, with a rota of students taking turns to steward it.

The opening night was a great success - but ridiculously crowded.  Over 100 students were finishing, and the college space is tiny, so it was quite a squeeze with parents and children and friends all winding round the corridors trying to see all the work.

I thought the standard was generally pretty high, and it was good to see the finished work of so many of the full time students, who we have had very little to do with most of the time.  Here are some images of some of the work I particularly liked, but I fear I did not always securely attach names to images, so some are unattributed.

I really liked several of the painters' work, but especially this one by Georgia Smith.

This was an amazing construction of a garden shed, complete with a full complement of bits and pieces.

These face casts were cleverly located half-way down the stairs to the ceramics studio.  

This was by Maeve Anne, who is going on to do an MA in Dublin, and is about the way we perceive meaning in relation to images.  It was huge, about 4 ft in diameter. 

This complex map of Easton, a Bristol neighbourhood, was by Jo Knight, and represented the women in this culturally and ethnically diverse area, and recorded the places they had come from. Jo did a series of taped and transcribed interviews with the women too.

This is part of a group of pieces by James Norman, called The Departed, which was about the loss of lives in the First World War.  This piece is a relief, rather than a painting, and includes a muddied and battered pair of soldiers' long-johns, and a lot of hatred fruit, and ash, and quite a lot of mud and pva as well as paint.  James also had a small excavation in the college back yard, and a very moving continuous sound accompaniment, of his reading, in dead-pan tones, a random selection of lines from Wilfred Owen's wars poetry.  It sounds chaotic when described like this, but in reality was both moving and visually (and aurally) exciting.  James is going on to do a BA in Fine Art at UWE 

And finally there was my box of bits of paper.  I attached a note to the box, in the hope that people would play with the scraps: 

deconstructing 

a life in words and paper

shredded, scattered and strewn

feel free to touch, delve, build, search find

de-constructing is also re-constructing

It seemed to work - people did investigate, and lift and dig and sculpt with the paper., so I achieved a result in terms of getting people to engage with the feel of the paper, and perhaps to think about how we throw things (including ideas) away, and how ephemeral our work can be.

 People also seemed intrigued by the tiny snatches of meaning on the scraps of paper strip - and they lifted them up to read and wonder about the words, and to search of other interesting snippets.  Someone said it was a bit like getting Fortune Cookies at a Chinese restaurant.  Or a Christmas lucky dip.  

Overall, I was quite pleased with how the show went, and how my pieces fitted in to the whole.  My film was on the show reel with 7 others, os it was quite a challenge for people to sit and watch the whole lot.  But whenever I went in to the film room, people generally were sticking with it, even though there was no punch line.  I didn't hear any negative comments so I guess that was as much as i could hope for.  I rather liked the film, anyway.