More from the foundation students!!!!

This week we caught up with Faith Pope and Chris Carpenter.

Faith Pope

Faith Pope's desk.

Faith Pope is one our Foundation students from outside of Hereford. She is from Prestigne, Wales. She completed her A levels at Hereford 6^th Form, where she studied textiles. Since starting Foundation, she has become interested in making jewellery pieces from Flymo and Millefiori. She specializes in small metals and is currently working on making metal lanterns that use a piercing technique.

Faith's metal lanterns.



Faith pierces the metal with a small saw to create shapes. Her lanterns feature shapes based on the theme of the animal kingdom which include frogs, insects, birds, and even the human form. Faith is planning to move to London after her Foundation year is over to pursue work experience in prop design. She is also planning to complete several short courses to broaden her skill set and maximize her professional options. She feels her time on Foundation has prepared her enough to begin her professional career. One of Faith’s goals is to have a market stall in London to sell her work.



Faith's metal lanterns lit up.



Chris Carpenter

Chris's desk.

Chris Carpenter is one of our local students. He studied at the Hereford Sixth Form College before enrolling onto the HCA Foundation. Chris has always been interested in art and especially computer based media. Though during his time on HCA Foundation, he has become interested in introducing more hand printed techniques into his work.

An example of Chris's work.



Chris has been inspired by the work of Alberto Seveso, especially his subversion of the human form. He has also been inspired by the typography of Nik Ainley. Chris thinks his time on Foundation has allowed him to experiment and broaden the media he uses.

Chris's digital illustration entitled "Teamo"

Chris's goal is to become a freelance graphic designer. He's on the right track already having set up his own graphic and web design company called Squidgy Triangles. Chris and his partner, Jake Macklin, have already completed designs for Solar Fit, Vintage Volumes, Hereford Brick and Stone, Oak Tree Stoves,and Shires Gas Services.

An example of Chris's typography design.

He would next like to develope a website for visual artists to showcase their porfolios online. Chris plans to take a gap year to decide where he would like to go next. He is leaning towards Cardiff University.

More from our Foundation Students




Foundation studio (where the magic happens!)

 

This week I met with Jordan Baxter and Alex Naylor.

Jordan Baxter

Jordan's workspace

Jordan Baxter comes from Leominster. A few years ago, Jordan completed an National Diploma in Multimedia at HCA. He excelled in his second year and developed an interest in graphic design. Jordan took a year out, working full time while he decided what he should do next. He decided he really wanted pursue a career in Graphic Design and joined the Foundation course.

Jordan's graphic art using embroidery and screen printing..

Jordan's approach to graphic design is very hands on. He likes to incorporate hand made elements, such as screenprinting, into his design. This interest was developed through experimenting with the workshops available to the Foundation students.  He feels that his time on Foundation has helped him to understand himself and what he is interested in. He enjoys that there are no boundaries and the briefs can be tailored to incorporate what he is interested in.

Jordan's typography.

One of the projects he has most recently been working on is a creating graphic art pieces based on a man he once worked with named Darrell. Darrell, at first glance, is a burly hard man, but Jordan has taken the time to get to know the more intimate and soft side of Darrell, whose appearance does not immediately conjure a gentle demeanour.



This is Darrell. Hi Darrell!



Jordan uses images of Darrell and combines them with the softer insights made by Darrell in typographical ways. He is interested in the contrast with the appearence of Darrell's hard exterior and his thoughtful rememberances of his mother. The effect is full of kind-hearted humour. Jordan is now applying to go onto university. He hopes to go onto University College Falmouth or University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Good luck Jordan!

This is Jordan's graphic art about Darrell.

Alex Naylor

Alex's workspace

Alex Naylor is from Ross-on-Wye. After his A-levels, Alex felt he might want to study in a different area than Herefordshire. Luckily for HCA, he decided to stay and pursue his studies on the HCA Foundation course. He liked the school’s reputation and felt it was a strong course for him to strengthen his skills.

Alex's recent project

 

At the time, Alex was interested in painting and also had experience in theatre and drama. The foundation course gave him the idea to combine performance into his art practice. Recently he has been working on making images in the darkroom by immersing photographic paper in water and exposing the paper with a flashgun. He then projects the images onto people and photographs the combination.



In one example, he projected these images onto a dancer. The shapes made by the dancer’s body create a sympathetic geometry with the shapes in the water. Alex has plans to work these into a moving image piece. Alex feels the access to the various workshops helped him gain enough knowledge to match techniques fit his ideas. He has also found the dialogue with his lecturers and peers helpful in producing his own work. He has applied to go onto do a Fine Art Degree in London and University College Falmouth. He hopes to continue his Fine Art work and also get back into acting.

Alex's projection with dancer.

More next week from the foundation students.

Hereford College of Arts Foundation Studies in Art and Design StudentFeature

Foundation Studio

Foundations Studies in Art and Design

For the month of February, we are going to focus on the students from the UAl Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at HCA. Foundation is an integral part of art education. Students who choose to do a foundation year are often more prepared for Higher Education than those who go directly into HE from A level. Students here are encouraged to develop critical thinking skills and to become articulate practitioners in their chosen fields. They leave with the ability to create with depth and vision that goes beyond the surface of the visual art they are making. These are things Higher Education institutions are looking for when interviewing students. At HCA, the students also benefit from the art experiences of their lecturers, as they are all creative practitioners themselves.

This time of year is busy for Foundation students as they are preparing their portfolios and for interviews with Universities they are hoping to attend. I had a chance to meet up several of the students to discuss their experience on the course, their own practice, and their hopes for their future.



Georgie Rees

Georgie's workspace

Georgie  Rees is a local girl from Hereford who joined Foundation after completing her A levels at Hereford 6^th form College. She has always been interested in fashion, but after completing a City and Guilds at Inkberrow Design Center in pattern cutting, she began to take a more focused approach to her work. 





Example of Georgie's work.



Georgie has taken her interest in pattern cutting and looked at ways to change the silhouette. She is also influenced by the work of Erdem, a designer who uses prints and embellishes the fabric with embroidery to make new textures. She has introduced these methods of producing texture into her own work. 





Another example of Georgie's work with pattern cutting and textiles.

Georgie feels her time on Foundation has opened her eyes to new ways of thinking about producing work. It has also strengthened her own interests and ideas, focusing them more concisely. The access to the workshops at HCA has allowed her to introduce the use of small metals, screen printing, and even photography into her work. Georgie is currently applying for university. She hopes to be accepted at Westminster University. 





Georgie Rees and one of her designs.

Lucy Noble

 

Lucy's workspace

Lucy Noble is from Leominster. She completed her A Levels at Hereford Sixth Form where she studied Art, Illustration, and Film Studies. She decided on HCA after seeing how well her sister did here. (Her sister now studies at Slade.) Lucy has always been interested in cinema as an artform. She is inspired by artists who make Expanded Films (films that do not follow traditional narrative) and Video Installations. 

Still from Lucy's film Palimpsest

She enjoys the films of Mike Figgis, who is a pioneer in digital technology in filmmaking; Jan Svanknejer, Grayson Parry’s textile houses, and Rachel Whiteread's interiors. Lucy is interested in spaces and how the are used (or not used) and the resonance of those spaces. She is very interested in the  the emotions tied into spaces. These can be dollhouses or empty rooms, or even abandoned houses. She often produces work that focus on the melancholy of empty space. 



Still from Lucy's recent film Palimpsest



In Lucy’s recent work, she filmed an actor in an dishevelled house doing domestic actions. She also filmed herself doing those same things in her own home. She then edited the two pieces, layering them together to produce a ghostly performance where the real home and the discarded home are often hard to tell apart. Lucy plans to study Film Production and would like to be able to incorporate her artistic approach into more mainstream filmmaking.

One of the model's Lucy has hand made from different materials such as ceramics.



A clip from Lucy's film  Palimpsest

More Foundation students next week!

LIFT OFF!

I just wanted to write a little bit about the aim of this blog.

We as a college are very proud of the work being made by our students. We have created this blog as a place to show their work to a wider audience in a more current fashion than a website is able to offer. Every Wednesday we will feature students from a different campus at Hereford College of Arts.

HCA is unique in that we are a specialist art school. We offer courses in art and design, media arts, performing arts, and music from post GCSE level and go all the way up to Degree level (we even have evening and short courses in many different disciplines). We offer a creative environment for students to learn a wide range of art practices. All teaching staff are creative practitioners themselves and encourage students to be critically engaged with the subjects in which they are interested.  We encourage experimentation of mediums through the wide variety of workshops available to them.

We hope this is a place you will visit often and share this with others who are interested.