Published at 08:58, Tuesday, 05 June 2012

It has to be one of the biggest art shows anywhere. Studios, hallways, corridors and room after room at two of the University of Cumbria’s buildings are crammed with dazzling work never displayed before.

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Not just drawings and paintings but ceramics, photography, installations, videos and costumes are on show – produced by more than 200 artists who have just been entitled to add BA after their names.

The annual summer show of final year graduate artwork will open tomorrow and features varied work by students on any one of the university’s 15 different art and design courses.

The massive exhibition covers the Brampton Road and Newcastle Street campuses and has been organised by principal lecturer Steve Ogden, who says: “It is a must-see show, and one of the most exciting exhibitions in the Cumbrian creative calendar. It displays the creative excellence of our graduates.”

It would be easy to spend hours exploring the exhibition and the News & Star spoke to just a few of the artists about their creations.

Emma Wood’s work reflects her fascination with the night sky. The 22-year-old textile artist, from Newcastle, has designed a range of lampshades bearing the constellation and she has also produced a series of one-off prints using embroidery and materials such as metallic leather to create scenes of outer space.

“I like the unknown nature of space,” she explains. “It’s slightly scary to a lot of people, so it’s a great source of inspiration.”

Mature student Janet Wilde, 54, from Cockermouth, is exhibiting a dress she has designed for Titania, queen of the fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Janet has designed costumes for Cockermouth School dramatic productions in the past and says: “I’ve got an interest in ‘wearable art’. I’m quite a practical person – I like making actual things and when you’re creating fantasy costumes you can let your imagination run free.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set within woodland so the dress is in a woodland setting as well. It is on show against a backdrop of digitally-manipulated photos Janet took in the woodlands around Borrowdale.

Janet only came to study art formally three years ago. “I didn’t think I was good enough when I was younger,” she recalls. “I wanted to prove a point to myself.”

Debbie Wilmer, 20, from Preston, also works in textiles; for her final degree work she has created three textile collages of the village of Staithes on the east Yorkshire coast, using different dyeing techniques to create lines and colours.

Each collage shows the same scene – but closer and closer up, so the pictures are all strikingly different.

“I went to Staithes during the summer and it was quite a quirky little place,” says Debbie. “Its colours really appealed to me.

“And I’ve always enjoyed working with textiles. You can do so many things with them.”

Ceramicist Lucy Mikkelsen-Barron, from Keswick, has been creating pieces based on shapes from nature, such as leaves and mushroom tops – and then experimenting with crystalline glazing to colour them.

She creates small grooves and ridges on the work which catch the glaze and create pools of different colours. “You never know what you are going to get,” she says. “It’s very unpredictable. No two pieces are ever the same.”

Lucy, 21, first discovered her passion for ceramics by visiting Potfest. “I used to go quite a lot and I just loved it. That’s how I got interested.

“I’ll be taking some work there this year.”

A series of upstairs rooms at Brampton Road have been given over to photography. There are rural and urban scenes, landscapes and people, in colour and in black and white.

Photographer Amy Irving, from Workington, produces pairs of portraits of people such as historical re-enactors, drag queens and children’s entertainers – including herself – both in plain clothes and in costume.

“I think I work best with people and I like being able to get something back from them,” says Amy, 20. “It’s more collaborative than a with a landscape.”

By contrast Joshua Wyborn, 20, from King’s Lynn favours landscape photography shot in black and white. They range from views of St Bees and Silloth to the Angel Of The North outside Gateshead and the Forth Bridge just north of Edinburgh.

“I like to go out on my motorbike and find places to photograph,” he says. “I use long exposures and tilt lenses – and hardly any Photoshop. If I can, I work in a darkroom.”

Many of the works at the Caldewgate campus in Newcastle Street are installations – sometimes strange structures that can make us look at the world in a different way.

Jan Laird, 21, from Ayrshire, comes from a farming background and specialises in drawings and paintings of animals. But for her degree she also created an installation entitled One Way In, One Way Out.

One side is the entrance to a slaughterhouse, the metal tiles on the floor each bearing the footprints of an animal on the way to its death. On the other sides are four casts of a cow’s feet – showing what’s left behind when the animal is turned into meat.

“I’m not trying to put people off their food!” she says. “I’m just highlighting the relationship between us and the food we eat.”

Brogan McCulloch, also 21 and from Ayrshire, created an installation of a room with ripped wallpaper – and a dark, eerie atmosphere. She found inspiration in a story she had read, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, in which a sick woman is confined to a room to recover – but feels trapped there and becomes a lot worse. “I wanted to create a room which feels as if something has happened there,” she explains.

Laura Craig, 22, from Glasgow; has created an installation entitled Layers. Light beamed off a large, angled mirror creates a bright perfect rectangle on an otherwise very dark floor – as if one area of the floor has been varnished.

Its aim is to draw attention to our surroundings. “It’s a response to a space – to show us what’s in front of us and appreciate what we’ve got.”

The University of Cumbria’s Summer Arts Exhibition runs until Wednesday, June 13 at Brampton Road campus and fine art at Newcastle Street, Caldewgate. Open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm on weekdays and from midday to 4pm on Saturday. Admission is free.

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk