University College Falmouth MA Stars

'Axis', the UK’s leading online resource for contemporary art, has selected two MA graduates from University College Falmouth for their 2008 awards.

Emma Bennett, who has just graduated with an MA in Performance Writing (with Distinction) has been chosen as one of four MA Stars 2008. Students are nominated by influential artists, curators, academics and arts professionals, who choose on the basis of work presented at annual degree shows by 34 UK Higher Education institutions.

Sue Coulson has nominated Emma for her performance of ‘Thick Description, which Emma describes as a spoken performance with object-interruption and her attempt to perform the ‘sculptural-funny’ in language, in speech. ‘Sculptural’ because it has to do with form, shape, matter, position space; and ‘funny’ because it has to with timing, calamity, stupidity and surprise’.

Sue Coulson describes the piece as “a conversation between a performance and an installation, leaking across two separate venues, each leaning upon and supporting the other, the audience caught in a pause between a visual image and the textual flow. It might simply be a comment on colour and the silly words used to 'describe' tints on a paint chart, or the covering over of the banal with a paint job or just a clever piece of visual writing.”

In September this year, as one of only two students, Emma presented a paper at the international symposium ‘Writing Encounters’ held at York St John University, alongside a prestigious list of scholars, writers, producers and critics. She has since moved to London to continue her work as a performance artist but has also just started teaching a module on Writing for Performance at the University of Hull’s Scarborough campus.

Axis also selects and features a list of current artists and, right now, these include Rod MacLachlan, who also graduated from UCF this year with an MA in Fine Art Contemporary Practice. The work nominated is entitled Paint Can, Reflecting.

Rod’s current research has led him into the world of Phantasmagoria and pre-cinema projection techniques. He says “ I was drawn to the apparatus and light sources used in 18th and 19th centuries from simple candle-lit, white-shadow projection to candle, gas and limelight powered Magic Lanterns, Fantascopes and Megascopes. Looking at devices from this period, I can sense the wonder felt at the first use of chemical, optical and electrical processes that we now take so for granted. The complex evolution of these technologies and our familiarity with them has led to detachment from the forces at work. In my work I wish to reveal the process and recreate some of the sense of wonder.”
The Cornish artist Patrick Lowry has nominated Rod’s work and says “The image's real and palpable presence reminds one of how used we have become to viewing so much of the world though a patina of pixilation, and how some of the pre-digital image-making processes hold particular qualities that still, at least in Maclachlan's hands, have something further, and interesting, to say.

For further information about the MA Performance Writing course at University College Falmouth, Dartington Campus visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/MA Performance Writing; email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01803 862224.

For more information visit http://www.axisweb.org/