The Royal College of Art Graduate Exhibition

Show RCA 2013 took place from 20 to 30 June, in six buildings across the College’s two campuses in Battersea and Kensington. If you missed the Show, you can still catch up on exhibiting students' work and profiles through the Digital Catalogue.

This year, Show RCA presented an unprecedented number of graduating students and spanned seven buildings across the College’s Battersea and Kensington campuses. The organisation of space reflected capital developments at Battersea, already – with the opening of the Dyson Building last September – the home of the complete School of Fine Art, and pointed towards the forthcoming Woo Building, soon to house Ceramics & Glass and Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery.

Building on a collective, curated approach tested out in the work-in-progress shows earlier in the year, Show RCA 2013 emphasised the power of interdisciplinary creativity, and teased out the common and complementary narratives between programmes and Schools.
In Architecture, the underlying drive embodied a move away from unrealisable conceptual projects towards those that can be built.
In the School of Communication, the breadth of students exploring highly personal experiences through animation and illustration was noticeable – from a child’s reductive viewpoint, to precarious states of health.
Multiple collaborations were evident, most notably between Fashion and Textiles, and Textiles and Vehicle Design.

Ceramics & Glass adopted a strong fine art mantle this year, as well as finding new, architectural contexts in bespoke lighting systems and flooring. GSM&J students transgressed traditional boundaries once more, harnessing technology and even breaking into writing – challenging expectations of the discipline.

Across the School of Design, new materials and production processes were evident, as students wrestled with industrialisation to take ownership of manufacturing, and strove to replace resource-intensive materials with new circular, closed-loop making systems.
Within all programmes, particularly Printmaking, the tensions between historic and modern practice – and digital and analogue technologies – continued to inspire students, who drew upon such conflicts to provoke debate about our beliefs and cultural values. Some Photography graduates drew on sound and sculpture for impactful installations, while others have combined the medium with text and book. In Painting, themes of temporality, location, representation and a sense of being were significant this year, while renewed interest in Old Masters’ techniques, such as oil paint on linen, was evident.
The Humanities programmes, meanwhile, have made exciting forays into podcast, ambitious cultural publications, collaborative curation and performance art.

The exhibitions were free of charge, with much of the work available for sale or commission – ranging from paintings to prints, glassware to jewellery and furniture to textiles. Buyers had the opportunity to invest right at the beginning of an artist or designer’s career – with 15 per cent of sales going towards the Royal College of Art Student Fund.

School of Material: Ceramics and Glass
Clay and glass are materials: a focus on particular materials and a body of skills might be seen as limitations, but these learnt capacities free up wider territories of disciplinary practice. This programme is experienced and capable in fostering students whose ideas lead them in all the directions of art, craft and design. The current buoyancy of the field is due to the re-inclusion of decorative, domestic, sensual, and vernacular qualities, and narratives of memory, across art and design practice. Deeper interest in process and the origins of form, the meanings of personal and collective identities, and the materiality of everyday life in a digital age are also current issues in visual culture.
Making things and understanding how such things will exist in the world is central, and thus we engage not simply with a couple of media but have made a place for discursive practice where varied concerns intersect. The ‘application’ of process, skills, material understanding, and the development of ideas through making, is definitive.

Kensington Campus (and all general enquiries):
Tel: +44 (0)20 7590 4444 (Main switchboard), Fax: +44 (0)20 7590 4500
info@rca.ac.uk
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
http://www.rca.ac.uk

Shelley James
Ceramics & Glass
Trained in textiles, at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, I worked in corporate design for international clients including Visa International, Shell and Habitat.
Keen to explore this theme of identity from a more personal perspective, I started to work with medical scans in the context of an MA in Printmaking at the University of the West of England. Research into the structures of the visual pathway led to an ongoing Residency with the Bristol Eye Hospital and experiments in glass, supported by the National Glass Centre in Sunderland.?Awards from the Wellcome, Crafts Council England and the Helen Hamlyn Foundation have led to my current AHRC-funded PhD at the RCA in London.
My work combines the graphic range of print with the optical qualities of glass, to explore the fugitive nature of spatial perception and the shifting boundaries between appearance and experience, material and virtual space.
www.shelleyjames.co.uk

Olivia Fink
Ceramics & Glass
Impressions of hot glass forms are captured within the solidity of cold glass objects. The transition between temperatures that join these individual elements are made visible by surface and consequently to us, through the modification of light as it travels through.
The glass volume becomes something that we can look into rather than through, here we can discover an unfamiliar space, which I hope will spark imagination.
http://livvyfink.blogspot.co.uk