On Wednesday 13 March, the LANS department celebrated the artistic talents of our students by featuring eleven students’ artworks within the space of the LANS hub accompanied by canapés, bubbles and live music from Joanna Stell on the flute.
First year Ethan Cobb on his work Inner Beauty:
“We are all beautiful on the inside. Millions of years of evolution has led to us covering up the body that we have acquired. We use clothes, make up and the way we present ourselves to express what we are on the inside. On the inside we are beautiful. Evolution has led to our organs being efficient at their jobs, keeping us, as a species alive, keeping you alive. I try to show this beauty of our organs in this collection of pieces. In the future I hope to explore the use of glue and spray paint more, exploring what we use to express outer beauty in the form of clothing, creating items of clothing using the same technique.”
Verity Parkin on her artwork on Growth and Decay in Natural and Urban Environments:
“I wanted to explore both natural and urban environments and their growth, change and death/dilapidation. First I looked at growth of lichen on surfaces in the natural environment to explore relationships between symbiotic and parasitic organisms and their hosts. I then translated these ideas to an urban environment to look at the processes of dilapidation through rusting and architectural regeneration of space.
I was influenced by urban weathering processes such as rusting, and by the population density and increasing urban sprawl in Ho Chi Minh City. Through layering of photographs to create a distorted, weathered street scene, I wanted to convey how the urban structure of the scene is changing at the fast rate of the motorcyclists moving within it.
Iona Keeley on her piece:
“This painting is inspired primarily by the work of Sergio Albiac who created an algorithm designed to make portraits composed entirely of space photography, synthesizing computer and human creativity. While his works of art are digital, I elected to use the traditional medium of oil on canvas. I recreated a photograph I took by painting individual overlapping circles, each one inspired by a photograph of space taken by the Hubble Telescope. I hoped to highlight the juxtaposition between a vast and infinite universe and the fleeting insignificance of human life to crate an aura of existentialism. It was the unique combination of technology, physics, philosophy, and art that lead me to create this piece.
Bronwen Roberts on her short film based on the theme ‘Translucent’:
“I have focused primarily on the artworks of Erwin Blumenfeld, Michal Macku and Dustin Yellin during the process of creating this piece. The film centres around the translucency of materials; I wanted to create a sensual experience of skin interacting with surfaces such as glass and fabric fused with clips of moving portraiture. The recurring motifs of faces and hands highlight this desire to touch and interact with the surroundings, and the underlying theme of entrapment speaks to the feature of the ‘modern Ophelia’ pictured in the bath. I set this piece to Jamie xx’s remix of the xx song ‘Reconsider’ as the steadily growing climax and pace of the piece builds up a level of urgency as the images sync and fuse between secondary and primary materials.”
