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This is your most recent project? So do you want to talk me through it?
My foundation is a way of me trying out different things and sort of finding my feet and working
out what I want to do. And also just having someone to just give me a little bit of direction,
a little bit of advice on what would be useful for me to consider for degree.
Looking at your portfolio, you’re very good conceptually and so you could go into so many
different areas. I would expect or hope to see a portfolio that is just presented very
well, showing a range of skills, showing primary and secondary resourcing.
Drawing is important, not drawing from photographs, you know life drawing, drawing from life.
You know it doesn’t mean a life model necessarily, if you’re in a school that does that or
provides that, great, but just sitting on a bench in a street and just quickly sketching
passers by, it could be going into a shopping centre. It doesn’t have to be labor drawing
of bowls of fruits and bunches of flowers, or portraiture.
Some of those drawings may not be highly finished, but they’re starting to work with proportion,
they’re starting to work with mark making, they’re starting to work with color where
they’re mixing and matching and they’re starting to bring it together, into compositions
that can have various developments.
I would like to see a breadth of work, and that includes skills, but skills can be many
different things. That’s not just observational drawing, life drawing and still life painting.
Yes I would expect to see some of that in a portfolio but I would love to see things
like photography, videos, sound installation.
Photographs, drawings, collages, bits of 3-D work, it might be really basic model
making or ceramics they might have done.
We are looking for people who actually have a desire to communicate visually and a need
to make images or objects. So yeah enthusiastic, curious students with some core skills who
actually have a desire to learn.
We in the university are recruiting from so many kinds of backgrounds, from so many different
countries and from so many different kinds of courses. Mainly you’re looking for potential.
So what we’re looking at is an unusual sketchbook…
They are able to demonstrate that they are using their research and to expand on their
ideas, but they are beginning to do that because a foundation would help them build on that,
as well as deciding which area they want to take further.
I went into the Foundation thinking I want to do printing and that is what I’m going to
do and actually after a couple of months I realized I was starting to get into animation.
That actually links here, so that section came out there, and then this is where your
animating is.
They should be able to talk about their work with confidence and even though they are just
starting at that level, because we are hand picking every student, it’s up to that student
to make sure that they have that confidence and interest and passion in what they’re
doing.
So this is a two day project, okay…
This is a white shirt project, where I have to produce some white shirts into some garments
which doesn’t look like a shirt…
Very often, at foundation level, you’re seeing students who have an idea about the
BA course that they might want to go onto after their foundation. School has taken them
up to a kind of basic level of painting and drawing where they’re now ready to begin
to develop themselves independently.
The main thing that I, or the team would be looking for would be to see that the candidates
have a real interest in the world around them. That they are visually inspired by things
that they are looking at. Not that they may have superb technique at that stage, but they
are curious, and they are actually beginning to work systematically.