Fine Art Staff Interviews - Roxy and Marion
In this series of staff interviews, Xuan, Junior Fellow in Art, sits down with Roxy and Marion, Co-Programme leaders for BA Fine Art and History of Art, to talk about the upcoming degree shows, and their own work on top of all of it.
Marion and Roxy, Fine Art and History of Art Degree Shows, 2024.
Xuan: Would you tell us a bit about your own practices?
Marion:
I had a sabbatical for the first third of this year, which was great. Those were the first sabbaticals offered by the Art Department, which is also great. I basically spent that time writing a book, which is now pretty much finished. It's starting to leave my hands now and that’s exciting. That's what I did in the first term from September to January, just sat in my house and wrote.
Roxy:
I have an upcoming sabbatical in September! Don’t want to jinx it by saying what I’m going to do but though my practice is grounded in painting, I've got a lot of writing I want to do, and I'm very excited to have a period of working in a way that isn't demand led. I really love teaching, but the course leadership is very demanding, and you've got to keep on top of things. It's a bit like your gangplank of attention is constantly building and then things fall off the end of it. So, the idea of being able to really, really concentrate on thinking for yourself is huge.
Marion:
All the staff on this course are part time. We have different practices and do lots of other things alongside teaching, so sabbaticals are really important. The university wants its staff to be research active people and that needs to be factored in. So that's been that's been a major good move. It was a lot of hard work to set these up, it didn’t come easy.
Fine Art and History of Art Degree Shows, 2024.
Xuan
Has teaching impacted your practice and how you think about things in your own work?
Marion:
Students always have an impact. It's energising work. It brings you up against other people's ideas in embryonic form. I find it always surprising. I find it funny. There's a lot of humour. I think it's a privilege. It's generative in all sorts of ways.
Roxy:
We basically are paid to talk to quite interesting, intelligent, young people who are interested in what they do. The basic bit, this central tenet of teaching is a real privilege, and to be able to bring our knowledge and to orchestrate students' knowledge so that they have the best opportunity to develop what they want to do.
Marion:
A programme like this is not a linear thing. It's not 'do it this way and you'll get that'. It's quite a long arc over three years, so we don't know the end point and they don't know the end point. But that's quite an interesting place to be in, somewhere in the middle ...(laughs).
You work with ideas students bring in and think quite fast on your feet. What might be useful to this person? Has this person has heard of X? Or how might they look at this idea differently? You learn a great deal from students.
Xuan:
How do you think student work has changed throughout the time that you've been here?
Marion:
It goes in cycles. There was a time when everybody was taking photographs, big blown-up productions. It was the default. At the moment, this isn’t the case. This year there’s lots of painting, a lot of mixed media installation work. Ours is a joint honours, theory and practice course, but we never treat students working in studio like part time students[RW1] [RW2] . We've talked recently about encouraging more performance within the programme. Developing outlets for students to encourage that takes time. You have to constantly be looking at the borders of what the programme seems to support, to make sure students don't get the idea they have to make objects which look like X or Y or what everyone else is making.
Roxy:
I think one of the things I've enjoyed this year about student work is people being able to make space for reflective looking and have work that's not overexplained. I had a crit with a second-year student showing quite an introspective painting, and it was one of the best, longest silences in a crit I've ever been in. It. was like a silence which wasn't embarrassing. It was very moving, because the painting did its job and wasn't overwhelmed by questions.
Marion:
There was one time in a crit when someone showed a quite peculiar set of drawings. I was curious. I didn’t know what they were derived from, but I also didn’t need or want to know. They were hung at a particular, low height, with lots of clear decisions made around presentation. The student refused to say what the images derived from, so the conversation went in many different ways. For some people in the room it was frustrating, but for others that was really fun because we didn’t need to go “ahhh, solved!” The idea of ‘solving’ or ‘getting’ an artwork is very reductive. Allowing space for things to remain ambiguous is complicated and people were aware of the power of that. If a work can be encapsulated in a sentence, why are we making the work? The physicality and all the decision making around presenting ideas is something all artists have to deal with. It’s the business we’re in.
Fine Art and History of Art Degree Shows, 2024
Xuan:
How has the course been so far?
Marion:
It's always an engaging course to work on. Students each year are very different.
It's a very exciting time of year now – June – as the shows are going up, so there's a sense of collective, collegiate activity. Students really rise to the occasion. The last bit of the third term is always an energising time of the year.
Roxy:
I think one of the things I've really enjoyed this year are the cross-cultural conversations in crits, really good discussions of quite personal stuff in a public space, which feels like a safe space. I've enjoyed the team teaching and the relationships between staff because that changes every year, new people come in or interact differently in crit teams, so staff are stimulated. We try and switch things around a lot, so that it’s engaging for everybody.
Xuan:
Has there been any groundbreaking moments in crits this year?
Roxy:
There was an amazing conversation about different attitudes to different religions in one of the first term crits. I thought, that aren't very many places that that would take place in. It wasn't about belief, but about relationships to to cultural frameworks. I don't think that would have happened as much 5 or 6 years ago, in terms of openness.
Xuan: Has teaching been difficult this year regarding financial and wider issues in the UK and the current world?
Marion:
It's a hard time to be in a university. It shouldn't be this hard! The UK-wide situation impacts on everyone. Student's financial situations are precarious year on year. London is a very difficult city to be living in for a person with not much money. I'm full of admiration for our students, in the ways they juggle these issues on what is quite an intense course and full-on programme, and keep lots of things going at the same time. It shows a lot of commitment and desire, a lot to be applauded.
Xuan:
Do you work with visual cultures very closely for this course, or do you like to keep yourselves quite distinct?
Marion:
Yes, and no. Visual Cultures have their own staff team, so students have access to another set of staff and other ways of engaging with ideas. We work very closely with Anthony Faramelli, the co-programme leader. It is a joint programme, 50:50. You’re kind of saying to students, you will get this kind of education, and you will get this kind of education, half practice-based and half theoretical. Obviously, there's lots of correlations between the two departments but in a quite major sense, it allows the students autonomy to navigate these different pathways in a way that suits them and not be spoon fed. It's not school. I think it's important to treat people like they have agency in things they learn.
Xuan:
How are you feeling about degree shows?
Roxy and Marion:
Excited! It's going to be great, yeah.
Marion:
This moment is always a bit scary for students because you know, a room can look like a total mess until it doesn't. But we’re not scared, because we’ve seen it before, and it always works in surprising ways.
Roxy:
It’s always hard to predict what’s going to happen when the studios are empty.
Marion
The show looks very professional. So it is a lot of pressure. Most students have never had experience on a show like this before and it's a huge learning curve. We always tell them, this is not the only show you'll ever do, there will be others – to get around the idea that ‘everything I have done has to be in this show. It isn't the only show. Students go on to do others. But they learn loads from the decisions they make here and the experience of working together.
Xuan:
For sure I think you do need the peer pressure to make the work, the discipline to do it is hard without the support you get from community, that was very much part of uni.
Roxy:
I think that peer group stuff is incredibly important. Our teaching structures are designed to support that. We try to foster a community and peer group which allows people to sustain these networks, collectives and support systems after graduating.
Marion:
When I went to university there was very little emphasis on the collective. It was the old, myth of the solo artist in his – most often his – studio working away. There's now much more sense of people being held and supported.
Roxy:
The crits now are much more of a conversation than they ever were. I mean, when I was a student, the staff would give their opinion. It was like a spectator sport for the other students in the room, you felt like you ‘survived’ it. Crits were more combative and less discursive than they are now. The crit structure is about learning to be respectful but critical, and learning to digest and reflect on work whilst being supportive and usefully questioning of it. Crits are about learning how to be useful to each other.
Marion:
Yes, it’s important to think about how to navigate work you might not like or agree with. You don’t have to necessarily throw it on the fire. DON’T throw the work on the fire!
Xuan: Why do you enjoy about teaching on this course?
Marion:
This programme is relatively small, meaning we get to know all our students. We see a lot of changes. I might have taught a student in first year and then have a tutorial with them in final year, so you're given an opportunity of seeing a student grow and being able to offer useful, reactive teaching. So again, that's quite a privileged position to be in. If you were in a giant lecture hall type of situation; you wouldn't have that engagement. I wouldn't want to do that kind of teaching. There's a degree of independence and agency amongst our students, which makes teaching a lot more fun.
Roxy:
We get really engaged students: they’re really interested in learning about the subject, and they bring an amazing range of interests. There are always surprises.
Marion:
I don’t think many people’s parents are forcing them to do Fine Art and History of Art for sure! So there’s already a certain degree of self-motivation. That’s great for the programme.
Roxy:
We get to teach people at different points in their practice and see students over 3 years, it’s incredibly rewarding to see how people have really learned something. The important part is not necessarily the grades, but the self-development, watching people over three years grow into themselves. And that's a real feature of the programme with the development and maturity of our students.
Marion:
The trajectory, where you can see a student taking ownership of their ideas is really engaging.
Marion and Roxy, 2024 (Photo by Xuan Yeo)