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!