Highly commended in the BSA Supporting Excellence Awards 2022

We are proud to have been highly commended in two categories at the 2022 BSA Supporting Excellence Awards.

This comes after being selected as finalists for the Best New Index Initiative, recognising our work on diversity and inclusion, and secondly for Best Artwork Project as a result of a submission by one our Sixth Form boarders, Joana.

Well done Joana for a fantastic exhibition.

Please see Joana's curatorial rationale for the show below:

My intention is to focus on perspective and explore what this means to an individual. My personal definition of perspective is “a unique way we perceive an object”. I find it fascinating how everyone sees, interprets, and loves the world in various ways. Not only was I going to explore the perspective of architecture (also as a drawing device) but also the meaning of perspective, a person’s point of view.

Time moves on. We can’t stop time and nor can we freeze it, it is all about making memories. Living away from home shortens my time with the ones I love most. It rushes away especially those beautiful moments. But for me when family members passed away it is the time when memory starts to unfold, because you can never recreate the same memory again and over time those memories will fade. In the show I wanted to bring alive a few memories once more.

I have explored different elements of perspective and narrowed down to three areas: modern architecture, the unity of family which gives me strength and courage and snapshots of daily life. I feel like we don't appreciate the little moments in life enough, we walk through life blindly. To explore these different interpretations of perspective I have used a range of techniques including layering figures to communicate fading imagery and memories, using transparent fabric, and tracing paper to create a certain blurriness, making faces and bodies indistinct. My other selected pieces are mostly two-dimensional works in various media: painting, printmaking, charcoal, and photography.

The elements that were most challenging were how the work should relate to each other in the space and developing a confident visual language for my ideas. In the process of hanging my exhibition I realised that less is more and sometimes I needed to remove pieces to create visual coherence.

To represent the fragility of memory I used light, and handwriting contained within a light box. This was a very personal installation where the shadows create faces of family members. Overlayed with a personal reflection from their perspective about me. The multiple layering, enlargement of the writing with the faces was the key to merge to make it unclear, illegible. This is intended to evoke the curiosity of the viewer. One of the boxes has no face, with the intention that the only thing I am left with is the memory of their words, since they sadly died.

Furthermore, I grouped certain pieces according to their meaning and intentions to create one work. I hung up the pieces with the writing away from each other because I didn’t want to make the written text to be too dominant and each of them possesses something unique. I hung the work that focuses on architectural perspective with the work that focuses on human perspective together, as this represents how they merge together in our lives.

Another part of my selection focuses on daily snapshots as a reflection both physically and metaphorically. The purpose of my photography series is the unknown people, as this creates a certain distance from the viewer. Neither the viewer nor I at that moment know what is going on in their mind. I find this curious, as it captures the ambiguity. I placed the photos in a horizontal line, to communicate the flow of movement of the figure to the audience.

I selected a space by the window as one of my pieces is a hanging installation, of multiple frames covered in transparent fabric. The natural light penetrates differently onto the fabric and strengthens the blurriness of the captured memory. This makes the viewer want to have a closer look at the ink washed figures. The viewer will firstly see it from a side view and thus will need to go around to observe it from front view where the narrative perspective and the true effect is created.

I would like my work to cause self-reflection for the viewers, open their minds to new ideas and enable them to value the small things in life. Looking back into the past at memories they love most and ultimately resulting in my work having a beautiful and lasting impact on them.