Tuesday 17th March 2015 6-8pm Q-Art Crit @ UAL High Holborn The Boardroom 272 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EY   This crit brings together student, graduate and self-taught artists from across London. Please rsvp to [email protected] if you’d like to attend or present work at this event.   Sara Bellon Curator/Artist www.sarabeeart.weebly.com Statement about your practice: Simple but fundamental questions animate the creative process in my practice: How does memory work? How can we investigate the standpoints created by memory through the pictorial element? Through memory we re-generate images, stories of lived experiences that in their own right are micro-existences with distorted colours, different compositional elements and perceptions. Memories are built through opposite angulations, in their becoming, with finished or unfinished results. My interest for colour contrasts and structure is fundamental and reflects the idea that ambivalent forces, when they meet, can create, destroy or find a fine balance in the composition just like the contradictions emerging from memories. This confrontational exchange generates a dialogue between the works as small fragment of my memories and through a plan of combinations, which reveals its sustaining formal structure. Representation replaces reality with a series of signs that can be interpreted and reinterpreted differently every time like memories: blocks and defined lines represent finished poles and are mixed with the smudges of forms which are still evolving, in their becoming in an highly lyric approach to the abstract composition. As artist and curator I felt the need to create works that are accessible, popular: rather than self-reference I aim at analysing issues and ideas through emotional contents, aesthetic and materials Feedback you are seeking from crit participants and what you’d most like to get out of the crit: I am looking at getting a perspective from the viewers in relation to clarity of choice related to materials, idea and the way through my ideas are translated through the work. I would like to have an exchange of ideas, suggestions and a constructive critique on the works. Mel Cole MA Fine Art Graduate 2012 Camberwell/Chelsea (1 part time year at each) Drawing Tutor www.melcole.co.uk Statement about your practice: I draw objects, as a vehicle to explore ideas of the abject and the uncanny. My drawings can make ambiguous suggestions, by animating the inanimate and treating the object as if it had a sensibility. I am interested in how a banal object becomes ambiguous and therefore real to an individual, For me the drawing does not have to make sense, it does not have to be immediately clear what it is, I like the potential ambiguity of it, the inability to name or recognize what the drawing is of. The combination of delicate pencil line and unnerving subject can simultaneously repulse and attract the viewer. I enjoy the juxtaposition of the potentially ugly object and my intense delicate pencil marks. Feedback you are seeking from crit participants and what you’d most like to get out of the crit: I would like to get constructive feedback on what / how the audience reads in my work, and where I can potentially go next with my drawings, how they can be developed further. Sheila Buckley Disillusioned MA Fine art dropout Statement about your practice I have been an art student for the last 6 years and before this I was an unaffected artist. I am grappling with the social, the political, you, us, the Ego & me. Feedback you are seeking from crit participants and what you’d most like to get out of the crit: I am interested if people find elements of the work strong or weak. Too direct or obscure. With this work I have ventured into the unknown, I have started to use my own text. I would like people’s opinions and recommendations about using text.   Carianne Annan Fine Art1st year Central Saint Martins Statement about your practice Being a black hairdresser I am very involved with a specific society/group of women (regulars). Their gossip becomes my gossip. Their despairs automatically become my despairs. The head is a gateway into a person’s mind and pure thought and a true reflection of the unspoken words they think. My current practice revolves around figuring out a way of communicating with a specific niche group of people, where only we (say hairdressers) can truly understand ourselves, keeping our own thoughts and words private. Also having to learn English with difficulty and a great deal of silence at school, using my hands for communication was needed. ​Secrecy is key within my practice and so is obscurity. I aim to blur out the visuals and keep it very abstract. Not knowing and allowing the viewer to guess what is going on allows me to get deeper into their mind and their thoughts, thus creating a new body of work. Feedback you are seeking from crit participants and what you’d most like to get out of the crit: • Ways to improve my work • Can others read my work in the way I intended it to be read? • In what ways could I make my work more interesting for the viewer? • In creating a secret language, do they feel I should have made my message more abstract? Should I have kept the meaning more subtle?