Unlike the BA exhibition, there is more space to breath as there are fewer students involved. Walk into Camberwell College and turn right for the MA Select Showcase where Camberwell Space has selected a selection of work across the MA courses. The work that most strikes me are the miniature ceramic pots by Yuta Segawa – some are as tiny as a fingernail. Anyone who has entered the Ceramics department or the college canteen in the last year has watched Yuta Segawa’s obsession grow as he is constantly making and selling these creations. (I am a proud owner of one of his tiny pots that sits on my window sill). Later in the exhibition we even see him using his feet on the pottery wheel.
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MA Illustration
The illustration display mostly contains brightly coloured prints. However, students like Xiangli Zeng also experiment making fold out books. I also love that they showed their sketchbook in the exhibition as this always gives more insight into a student’s work. I liked the pencil drawings by Apura Talpade who manages to combine figurative drawing with pattern making. I enjoyed Rui Wang’s interactive activity in which she asks visitors to all draw on one etching plate that she will have printed and post on her website later – looking forward to seeing the result. Martina Paukova has a style and bright colour scheme that seems fashionable with illustrators lately. Rhiannon Archard created a really unusual and beautiful etching with birds printed around the edge of where the plate was placed. Arthur Rimbaud creates fun and expressive story illustrations with a biblical aesthetic. Georgia McAusland makes a usually gruesome topic (birth) both delicate, beautiful and natural in her large-scale uterus print which is comical yet still aesthetically delicate in her smaller prints. The course has a shop within the exhibition where some beautiful prints are available.
MA Book Arts and MA Printmaking
MA Book Arts contains some conceptual ides of bookmaking as students challenge what a book can be:
MA Printmaking contains not only prints but also installation work. The students also experiment with fabric, bookmaking and scale. This course also has a shop within the exhibition.
MA Visual Arts
The MA Visual Arts course looks more Fine Art based as we see photography, sculpture and painting work. Anglique Naima Talbot uses rolled up pieces of maps to weave a basket. I like this as it seems to create some kind of metaphor about different places and the movement of them and how they weave in and out of lives…or is that just me? Charles Harrop-Griffiths creates a painting of people with stitching on it, which represents the network connections we make online, but how anonymous the people involved are.
Within the MA Visual Arts course there seems to be a sub category of MA Fine Art Digital, which was mostly patterned based, but included installations and sculptures and work made with signage by Lionel Openshaw.
MA Designer Maker
Yimeng Ou makes small worlds that are like ceramic set designs with little mushroom creatures moving around the roots of plants. Katarzyna Typek created a wooden piece of furniture with intricate symbolic imagery. Usua Perez Echegoyen weaves paper from books into unwearable clothing.
Words/Photos Florence Goodhand-Tait © artlyst 2015