|
Unmasked celebrates the achievements of our graduating students from the University of Cumbria Institute of the Arts BA (Hons) Fine Art Programme.
In the absence of a physical exhibition, this digital showcase provides an opportunity for our final year students to come together and show just some of their work produced under recent exceptional conditions. Our graduating artists have curated an exciting and diverse exhibition. The interdisciplinary nature of our course constantly produces emerging artists who work confidently in multiple media and this year is no exception. |
Included here are installations of painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, and costume. The work featured in Unmasked is a testament to each student’s innovative commitment to making and their awareness of current practices in the field. Expect to encounter a wide range of works, including those which focus on animal/human relationships, contemporary culture, mental health, globalisation, memory and – of course – the global pandemic and its effects on our social, political, and artistic climate.
Despite working under the most challenging conditions, our artists impress and surprise with the range, ambition, and quality of their work. |
|
Alexandra Weir
Contact “I have never made trials or experiments. Whenever I have had something to say, I have said it in the manner it needed to be said.” (Picasso, 1932) My practice involves capturing a moment in time and creating work that evokes the emotions associated with it. For this piece, I was inspired by my thirty-year relationship with my longest serving friend, Mark and the moment we met. I developed emblems and motifs from our teenage years that come together to form a multimedia installation. My aim is to allow the viewer to feel nostalgic for their youth. |
|
|
Amber McGhee
Contact Amber McGhee has explored the age of the Social Media Influencer in relation to James Bridle’s New Aesthetic theory to critically observe today’s society and the absurdity of modern life online whilst underpinning a critique of class issues in the UK. With relation to Shakespearean Tragedy and Aristotle’s Tragic Conventions, Amber utilises prop making, set design, film making, performance and poetry. She presents the downfall of the protagonist, Camden Brooklyn, creating a critical realist series of films that evoke moral lessons and highlight issues within society that are the catalyst for inevitable modern tragedy. |
|
|
Caitlin Hanna
Contact My work is a continued enquiry of Art and Text and the link between this creative output and human interpretation, connection, and communication; utilising self-confessionalism as a text base to create a narrative for viewers to connect with. Examination of this subject so far has outlined the capacities of these creative properties, such as the use of art and the inclusion of text within art, building connections not only for artists (in the realms of inspiration from artist to artist) but also for viewers to fulfil psychological needs of feeling seen and understood through emotional connection. |
|
|
Emily Miller
Website Contact The work shown is very personal to myself, it allows me to introduce my family to the audience. My practice is all about rematerialized memory, reconstructing my families lived experience and lived history. My practice applies biography as a structured agency to enable, using indexical traces, materials like coffee sacks, birth certificates and old photographs. A critical elaboration of my family history. Free machine embroidery has a profound impact on my practice, I use it in a metaphorical way to connect objects, photographs, and materials together, similarly to how as a family we are connected through blood and DNA. |
|
|
Holly Webb
Website Youtube Contact My current project, which began in September 2020 attempts to combine nature with news events that took place during April-August 2020, but were overlooked in favour of Corona Virus updates. Although originally this would be an attempt at being the news channel with the most viewers, it then leaves the audience uninformed about the rest of the world. I wanted to include nature, as it was where I spent the majority of my time during the first lockdown. I did this by creating insect characters in costume form, in order to include costume as my chosen media. |
|
|
Júlía Sól Kristindóttir
Contact I use the flow and splatters of diluted acrylic paint to find figures on the canvas. Following my intuition, I emphasize and develop these found creatures with oil paint. The work challenges traditional figurative artworks with a humourous and cartoonish approach to expression. |
|
|
Liz Moscrop
Website Born in Barrow in 1965, taken into care and adopted, aged 8 months, she was brought up in Carlisle where she currently resides. Currently a care worker looking after children and young people, in the care system, her career spans over twenty years, in a variety of roles. Commencing a BA(Hons) in Fine Art in 2018, she began making comparisons and contrasts between her own lived experience, as a child and the experiences of the young people she looks after. These pieces show aggression, pain and violence, alongside emotion, love and loss. |
|
|
Natalia Sebastian
Website Contact My main subject area for a while has been exploring the human and non-human relationship. Through two years of working with that theme, I have looked into the concept of an unspoken companionship that our pets provide us with and how we depend on each other in our everyday lives. I have also looked into what could be going on in our companion's heads while we away and comparing it to the times of us being together. Most recently my work has been concentrating on using an animal as a representation of humans in our daily routines however, Currently my work questions the love and affection we receive from our pets, does the attention they give us mean that they love us? |
|
|
Olivia Smith
Website Contact The work I have decided to show depicts how the fashion industries sizes do not cater to all shapes of people. I mainly focused on women’s clothing as it is more relatable for me and I can pull inspiration from personal experiences and my friends experiences. I’ve challenged the consumerism of this industry by enhancing the flaws in their sizing, such as extreme length in trousers, extremely short, cropped tops and why this industry is not good to buy into as it affects mental health and makes the consumer believe they should be able to conform to these unhealthy standards. |
|
|
Silja Sveinsdottir
Conact The focus of the series is on the city and how the urban landscape is reflected in history and culture. So, by travelling from the United States via Europe to Asia, we are confronted with different urban landscape and different urban reality that is reflected in the architecture and atmosphere of individual cityscape. This stands in contrast to my origin in the rural and remote landscape of the Icelandic countryside. Thus, in my work I try to capture the allure of the city as something dangerous and intangible but at the same time exciting and fascinating. |
|
|
Ellen Hodgson
Website The Choice is NOT yours is a set of two miniature models, these models show the capitalistic effects the private sector has on its clients who are exploited for profit and left to struggle for it. Through the medium of miniature models that portray an office of a therapist and the home of someone in financial difficulty because of the extortionate pricing of going to said therapist, I ultimately want to open a conversation about the capitalistic nature that surrounds the Private healthcare sector and how that industry excludes people from a particular class. |
|
|
The University of Cumbria Institute of the Arts | Brampton Road | Carlisle | Cumbria | CA3 9AY | UK
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|