The Hospitalfield residency programmes are devised for artists or others developing their working lives within the scope of contemporary art practices. Applicants will have had formal art or design training or similar and will be developing projects and new work for public exhibition or developing their research with some form of future public outcome in mind.

The programmes are structured for individuals working at a range of points in their career. The following are two current programmes open for applications:

Autumn Programme:
This is a funded programme and is open to application for artists who would benefit from a period of research and production between 1 – 28 September 2014. There are 6 places available on this programme and 3 Production bursaries of £4,000 are available for production projects. Applications are invited from artists who have the confirmed offer of an exhibition or commission in a public or not for profit gallery no more than 2 years after the completion of the residency.

3 Research bursaries of £1,000 are available for artists who require the time to research and develop an idea or project. Full board accommodation is provided with all full board costs covered. This opportunity is open to UK or UK-based artists. Students on BA or MA courses are ineligible.

Deadline: 14 February

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Graduate Programme:
This programme offers graduates from Scottish art colleges –  from both art and design courses, the time to work at Hospitalfield on a specific project that they would otherwise not have the opportunity to develop within this sort of collegiate situation. This residency takes place between 6 – 24 October 2014.
To be eligible you must be graduating in 2014 or have graduated in 2013 for a BA or MA art or design course at a Scottish college.

Deadline: 7 July

Hospitalfield House is located in Arbroath, Angus. For more details and to apply to either of the above programmes, please visit here.

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The University of Salford gives us an insight into their upcoming festival featuring the talents of their graduating students…

Open to the public over the weekend of 15 – 16 June, the Create at Salford Festival will showcase the talents of 800 final year arts and media students. The event combines the best in student art and design, performing arts, music, computer gaming, animation, TV news broadcasting and much more in a free festival of creativity for MediaCityUK and Salford Quays.

At IWM North, part of Imperial War Museums, on Saturday 15 June, follow the stories of three real GI brides brought to life by performance students, enjoy a 1940s-style swing band and jive, or enter ‘The Bunker’, where visitors will be challenged to help save humanity from the end of the world. The following day the museum will host war-themed electro-acoustic concerts by music students.

Cara Peeney, Fashion Image Making

At the University’s MediaCityUK campus, on the Saturday 36 students will showcase their designs in a Fashion Show with cutting-edge collections. The public can also enjoy a tour of the building’s cutting-edge facilities through playful, unexpected ‘pop-up’ student performances, and a range of live music gigs from the Egg Foyer stage.

On Sunday 16 June the University’s state-of-the-art Digital Performance Lab will host a fairy tale play with a Salford spin. The Very, Very, Very Sleepy Princess is a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty written, produced and performed by the Scallywags Children’s Theatre Company, a group of second year performance students.

Rachael Pegram

Throughout the weekend a range of demonstrations will be open, including the chance to play student-created computer games and try out stop motion animation, while visitors can experience a range of exhibitions showing some of the best work from art and design students, covering visual arts, photography, fashion, graphic and interior design among many other courses.

Professor Allan Walker, Head of the School of Arts & Media, said: “This event is the highlight of our academic calendar and its innovative format … at the Media City Campus means that we will be presenting an exciting range of specially commissioned pieces, live music and one-off performances alongside the static exhibition work.”

The Create at Salford Festival is open to the public on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 June, and takes place at the University of Salford, MediaCityUK, Salford, M50 2HE; IWM North, Trafford Wharf Road, The Quays, Manchester, M17 1TZ; and the Open Centre, MediaCityUK, Salford.

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Tutt Tutt is the alter ego of Lincolnshire based illustrator Sonia C Whitehead who works in graphics, publishing and print.

What’s in the blog:
Tutt Tutt’s blog is a mix of documentation of works, as well as posts about her current Degree Show.

Why we like it:
As well as pleasing patterns, we like that Tutt Tutt’s blog is really all about her work. Tutt Tutt is new to blogging and sees it as a “virtual journey.” We hope she continues on this journey as we sure do like seeing her work.

Hidden treasure:
Tucked away in one of her posts, Tutt Tutt’s illustration for children’s book Alice in Wonderland is so good, we just had to share it:

Where to find out more:
Read Tutt Tutt’s blog here.
Follow Tutt Tutt on Twitter.
Like Tutt Tutt on Facebook.

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Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

Here is a small selection:

Aimee Kemsley’s interventions in one of the main corridors.

Holly Keasey’s water pool installation.

Julie Duffy’s large-scale sculptural work in Cooper Gallery.

Lizete Druka’s ‘Mathemagical’ textile project.

Rose Hendry’s immaculately produced short video vignettes.

Barbara Beek’s integrated design solutions for nutrition information for women and children in rural Uganda.

More than 10,000 visitors are thought to have taken in this year’s Dundee Degree Show starting off with over 5700 people on the opening night.

There were almost 300 graduands from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design exhibiting their work from the 11 undergraduate programmes Textile Design, Illustration, Animation, Graphic Design, Digital Interaction Design, Product Design, Jewellery and Metal Design, Fine Art, Interior Environmental Design, Time Based Art and Digital Film and Art, Philosophy, Contemporary Practices.

My first 5 jobs after graduation from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 1990:

Think I was running 5 at once, nothing changes!

1. I was technician and teaching assistant in the Department of Photography (Fine Art) Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee.

2. On Saturdays I was exhibition’s assistant at Seagate Gallery, Dundee.

3. On Saturday evenings I was a Tequila girl selling bucket loads of the crazy stuff – the company wondered why Dundee suddenly peeked as a hotspot! I can’t remember why I gave that one up the commission was great, think it was the smell of alcohol on my apron – to this day I can’t bear the smell of Tequila.

4. I was also a nanny for the wonderful Pat Fisher – this was my fav job by far probably because it never really felt like a job. It was a couple of hours each eve. I do remember feeling very proud walking my three glorious little girls, dog and bike home after school every evening – lovely times.

5. When the contract at Duncan of Jordanstone finished (it was a year’s maternity cover) I moved to Glasgow and set up Fuse : an artist – led support network with free studio space, travel and materials allowance, exhibition and training opportunities for visual artists based in Glasgow this ran till 1999 during this time i also established Fly (now Market) then i moved onto CCA.”

Photo courtesy of David Zérah at Patricia Fleming Projects.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Last week I walked to London in order to, amongst other things, see the Royal College of Art graduate show (2).

The show was a highly polished affair, a topic i’ll return to later, but as a result it made me think more about whether this type of exhibition is the best vehicle for communication art and design, product and interaction design, and so on. What the alternative would be, i’m not sure, but i can confirm that spending a week looking over the Communication Art and Design (CA&D) publication and associated websites (not a solid week, obviously, as a clarification for any pedants out there) proved a far more interesting experience than the show itself. However I’m not denying that it was a very pleasant day out, and perhaps as good a route into the work as any other.

For an overview of individual students work, these reports offer more detail. Plus: (Interaction Site / C&AD site)

A hot topic of debate around CA&D at the RCA is the imminent arrival of a new head of department. Readers of Creative Review (amongst others) will be aware of the art vs design rumblings (aside: probably best steer clear of the detritus in the comments section, a more accurate analysis of blog-comment-structures here) and the machinations about big-names vs unknowns and false dicotomies of practitioners vs theorists. There are various sides to these arguements, but one thing they possibly have in common is to locate the head of department too centrally (or at the top of a big pyramid) in the eco-system of this course. Interaction design is an interesting case-study at the RCA, as though much of the work is intriguing and engaging and does open up questions of sorts, this year it all felt very much in the mould of a particular type of critical-design, as practised by the course leaders, and though my visit was brief, I didn’t see much which challenged this world-view. Another point to return to later.

Tucked away, and modestly presented, some very interesting projects were on view as part of the RCA/V&A MA History of Design Course, and I’m interested to know how this course interacts with the others.

On that note, I was also very interested in Department 21 which was in evidence at different points and in different departments in the show. A student-led initiative, it took a temporarily empty painting studio and used it as the focus for an ongoing programme of inter-departmental projects, talks and events. This for me is another ‘indicator’ of a desire acrossformal and informal educational experiences for a inter-disciplinary approach. I am not trying to claim that this is a new or radical thing, but am suggesting that the desire is strong and does exist, and that institutions (in their heirarchical, top-down mould) seem incredibly ham-fisted at delivering them, prompting interesting experiments like this one to spring-up.

One particular aspect of dept21 that interested me was a workshop and seminar on ‘de-skilling’. I’m fascinated by the idea of amateurism (in the best sense), and the prospect of an ‘amateur masters course’ (or masters in amateurism) is one i’d (perhaps mis-guided) sign-up for.

In a circular fashion, this brings me back to the emphasis placed on the new head of C&AD, the professionalism of its show, and a wondering about whether the significant developments in the course are likely to happen at its boundaries, and away from any one individual.

With the appointment of Neville Brody, I would hate the CA&D course to come to mirror its leaders. There are already enough supersonic ego’s in design education, and the star-cult of the individual is writ large. Thankfully there are those challenging this view, and even if the appointment was made on that basis, hopefully Brody will fall into this latter camp— I suspect he’s well aware of this potential pit-fall, and am interested to see what happens.

Images: RCA show2, Printers: ©Xavier Antin, and various, and Those that Move, off-site exhibition of Camberwell BA Graphic Design, at the Rag Factory, off Brick Lane.

P.S: Thought this RCA project was good, in relation to Central Station.

Interactive Media @ Dundee Degree Show via imd.dundee.ac.uk

Being a fellow graduate this year – eca, sculpture – this was me checking out the competition. (This is unbiased, promise). Having not been before, I didn’t really have any expectations – these are usually dangerous things to have anyway.

So, after last years expedition down the steps and towards the Tay (I have connections) the degree show is back within the college grounds, swallowed up by the winding corridors and studios everywhere that – my stupidity aside – were rather difficult to negotiate.

(Rather than giving a room-by-room, department-by-department run through of the show, this is my overview of the exhibition, taking into consideration that I’m horrible with remember names, details and everything else that would be useful to anybody.)

Primarily, I was disappointed with fine art as a whole. As I have found with other degree shows – gsa, eca, london schools etc – there are usually a few works/people that either stand out or at least have something interesting about them. Though, to say everything was uninteresting within Fine Art would be a rather harsh and sweeping statement, but generally nothing excited me. There was a slight un-polished finish to a lot of the work – generally a degree show trait – like they were expecting to be down the road again, but didn’t quite make it. (I don’t know the story here, so I’m only guessing).

Brushing this department aside – and again taking my forgetfulness into considerations – the highlight/redeeming part of the show was the Interactive Media department that, though off my tracks somewhat, provided design that was thoughtful, interesting and engaging. (There’s a link at the bottom; they’re all worth a look).

Overall, it was a bit disappointing, suggestive that the design departments of Dundee are producing students who are in turn producing work that is more deserving and demanding of attention.

Interactive Media