Dark Illuminations
MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase, May 2024
MA Fine Art Online is a flexible new postgraduate course at Falmouth School of Art. Our programme supports the development of innovative and sustainable contemporary art practice in the UK and internationally. This showcase, Dark Illuminations, celebrates a group of graduates – five women in five different countries – who have made ambitious public-facing exhibitions and live events this spring in New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, England and Ireland. Their projects are the culmination of two years of study across five modules and we are delighted to share them together here.
The academic team, and the whole course community, are now looking forward to celebrating all three of our 2023/24 graduate groups at our first graduation ceremony on the Falmouth campus this summer! And we can’t wait to see all these artists continue to develop their work and engage communities all over the world.
Josie Cockram, Course Lead
I am writing this text during the solar storm of May 2024 that lit up western European imaginations and cameras to reveal the aurora borealis, the northern lights, opening like a heavenly rupture into the multiverse. It seems serendipitous then that the title of this cohort’s MA Fine Art Online graduate showcase is Dark Illuminations.
The showcase brings together the final major projects of five artists from across the globe that I have had the pleasure to supervise over the past two study blocks. Rather than the transcendent, dazzling, spectacular and amorphous aurora borealis, Dark Illuminations brings together a range of projects rooted deeply to bodies and places here on earth; these artists have not shied away from challenging topics that feel pertinent to the world today. Their work has addressed a range of themes including the lived experience of disability, questions around identity, labour, social status and care, post-war cultural trauma, and the uncanny and sometimes disjointed experience of what it means to live in a rural landscape. I am proud to present this online showcase of projects where art operates to create a space for discourse, criticality, speculation, slowness, agency and poetry.
Kate Fahey, Final Major Project Module Lead
Special thanks to the following for all their work and support over the first two years of our programme:
Academic team: Josie Cockram, Kate Fahey, Ian Monroe, Iñes Bento Coelho, Caitlin Shepherd, Mohini Chandra, Evan Ifekoya, Flora Bowden, Srin Surti, Lucy Sames, Elizabeth Hodson, Luke Dowd, Karen Abadie, Joanna Griffin, Mary Anne Francis, Rachelle Knowles and Tom Baugh
Student Support & Digital Learning: Rachael Burhouse, Rachel Tor, Kenny McKenzie, Sam Cole, Ana Ene, Pip Keyworth and Roo Pescod
Organisational partners and collaborators: Lesley Williams, Ian Newness, Kerry Lon, Esther Boehm, Shane Humberstone, Abbey Stirling, Tina Franzen
West Acre Gallery, King’s Lynn, UK; 250 Gallery, Ponsonby, Auckland, NZ; Takeeb Gallery, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
The friends, family and support networks of all graduating artists!
Image: courtesy of graduate artist Mary Kirby