Sprig, Spire, Ember
MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase, May 2025
We’re really delighted to present the work of fifteen new graduates in this showcase, Sprig, Spire, Ember. Over the past months, these artists have produced ambitious public-facing exhibitions and events in a variety of contexts across the UK, in Romania, China, Bali, the US and online. Their projects are the culmination of two years of study across five modules on MA Fine Art Online at Falmouth and, collectively, this work exemplifies the spirit of our course; these projects are collaborative and discursive, committed to community, our environment and international connection. We can’t wait to see how these artists continue to develop their practices as course alumni.
Josie Cockram, Course Lead
The artists whose Final Major Projects are presented here have demonstrated an agile, responsive, and ethical approach to their research practice. Their work has explored a broad range of questions. These include care in marginalised and vulnerable communities, sculptural materiality, storytelling, and emotional and psychic responses to urban, online and rural environments. Their outcomes have encompassed sculpture, moving image, participatory workshops, podcasts, websites, performance, painting and printmaking amongst others. What brings these projects together is a sense of proximity – close looking, intimacy and care for their subject matter.
When gathering thoughts for this showcase, a number of ideas emerged around notions of growth: regenerating, germinating, unfurling, renewing… as students contemplated their immanent emergence from their graduate studies. These ideas could broadly be conceptualised as becoming – when things are more open-ended, evolving with past, present and future reconfigurations of the world and our relations among it. This is something the title of this showcase Sprig, Spire, Ember poetically alludes to. To quote Rosi Braidotti, ‘it happens between the no longer and the not yet and is fuelled by desire that traces the possible patterns of becoming’ [1]. Braidotti writes that the steps of becoming are ‘empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness’ – or what we might term as close relationships and a sense of community. Something this graduating cohort, and the MA Fine Art Online course more widely, has cultivated, and I hope will continue to foster and grow across geographical and temporal distances [2].
New becomings germinate new aspirations, new desires and new potentialities. Something I am sure this cohort will embrace and enjoy in their lives after graduation as they continue their creative practice with the support of their communities. Joanne Cassar, drawing on Karen Barad’s work, writes that ‘the state of being alive to the numerous possibilities of becoming is an ethical response in itself and affirms that being attentive to the wonders, mysteries and complexities of life that becoming entails is crucial to the process of worlding’ [3]. As these artists emerge from their studies, we are incredibly proud to share and celebrate their public projects through this showcase.
Kate Fahey, Final Major Project Module Lead
Special thanks to the following for all their work and support for these graduates:
Academic team: Josie Cockram, Kate Fahey, Mohini Chandra, Jo Griffin, Evan Ifekoya, Srin Surti, Lucy Sames, Mary Anne Francis, Flora Bowden,
Luke Dowd, Charlie Duck, Tom Baugh and Rachelle Knowles
Student Support & Digital Learning: Rachael Burhouse, Rachel Tor, Beth Sennett, Pip Keyworth and Sam Cole
Organisational partners: The Zeale family of Roadway Farm, Devon; The National Coal Mining Museum and Mining Remediation Authority; drag venues in Suzhou, China; Two Rivers Paper, Somerset; Cowlishaw Works, Sheffield; The Guildhall, Barnstaple, Devon; Cottesbrooke Church, Northamptonshire; Black Barn Studios, Suffolk; OVADA, Oxford; Aurora Art In Public Places and Tallyn’s Reach Library, Colorado; Leeds Central Library, UK; ARCA: Romanian Forum for Refugees and Migrants
The creative collaborators on these projects who are acknowledged on the artists’ individual project pages and websites
The friends, family and support networks of all graduating artists!
Image courtesy of Lou Thompson
References:
- Braidotti, Rosi. ‘The notion of the univocity of Being or single matter positions difference as a verb or process of becoming at the heart of the matter: Interview with Rosi Braidotti’ in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies by Dolphijn, R, van der Tuin, I, Arbor, A. Open Humanities Press, 2012.
- Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
- Cassas, Joanne. ‘Becoming’ New Materialism Almanac. Available at: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/body/becoming.html