Transient Frequencies

MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase, September 2024

MA Fine Art Online is a flexible postgraduate course at Falmouth School of Art, supporting innovative and sustainable contemporary art practice in the UK and internationally. Transient Frequencies celebrates a group of student artists who have produced brilliantly ambitious public-facing exhibitions, live events, publications and new collaborations this summer. They’ve worked within a wide range of contexts across three continents and we couldn’t be prouder to share documentation of all this work here online.

These projects are the culmination of two years of study across five modules. On behalf of the academic team, and the whole course community – congratulations to you all! We’re so looking forward to celebrating this work and watching how it develops within all your communities ongoing.

Josie Cockram, Course Lead

Transient Frequencies, the title of this summer’s MA Fine Art Online Graduate Showcase, brings to mind another title, Strange Overtones, a song written and composed David Byrne and Brian Eno collaboratively in 2008. The opening lyrics recount the noise of another person singing in the next apartment, padding around their domestic space, the distorted and transient sounds overheard through the architecture of the building. Indeed, the notion of home resonates through many of this graduating cohort’s final major projects, some of which address the socio-cultural meanings of places and things, specifically houses, domestic objects and local neighbourhoods, questioning what home means in a multicultural and globalised world. This comes as no surprise considering the array of geographical locations across the globe that our students call home, including Hong Kong, Canada, France, Cyprus, England, and the United States.

Many students have used their Final Major Project module to explore sound, and more broadly the physical and sensorial frequencies of places, things, architectures, and spaces, seeking out the hidden harmonies, vibrations, resonances and hums of human and more than human existence. These investigations extend to the rhythms and frequencies beyond the visual; the surface materiality of painted canvas, the tactility of tufted forms, the vibrancy of organic materials, and the infrasonic qualities of places, spaces and even the earth itself. Within these investigations, comes the impulse to record, to archive, to map, to document; a sound, a mark, a feeling, a gesture, a story, a walk, a conversation, so that they may be shared. The public facing outcomes within this showcase encapsulate a broad range of practices which these students have and continue to explore including sculpture, moving image, drawing, and painting, and more socially engaged ways of making and connecting.

In Strange Overtones, Byrne and Eno’s song lyrics capture the disorder and unpredictability of the creative process, and the role of collaborative and collective practices in song writing. Similarly, inherent to the projects shared in this showcase is the messiness of the creative process itself, which the title Transient Frequencies alludes to, the figuring it out, the noise, the artefact, the glitch, the overtone, and the notion that there is no single point of truth when it comes to artistic knowledge production and meaning making. Instead, Transient Frequencies reveals a compelling range of intersubjective, relational, and unexpected connections across humans and non-humans, materials, places, and things to generate a network of practice that we are privileged to share in this graduate showcase.

Kate Fahey, Final Major Project Module Lead

Special thanks to the following for all their work and support over the first three years of our programme: 

Academic team: Josie Cockram, Kate Fahey, Mohini Chandra, Evan Ifekoya, Jo Griffin, Flora Bowden, Srin Surti, Lucy Sames, Luke Dowd, Mary Anne Francis, Charlie Duck, Ian Monroe, Iñes Bento Coelho, Caitlin Shepherd, Tom Baugh and Rachelle Knowles

Student Support & Digital Learning: Rachael Burhouse, Rachel Tor, Pip Keyworth, Kenny McKenzie, Sam Cole and Roo Pescod

Organisational partners and supporters: Richard Atkinson-Willes from Talos Art Gallery; Stryx in Digbeth Birmingham; Creative Kernow; Dainton Self Storage; Sam Willis Carpets and Flooring, Paignton, Devon; the Portuguese Artist & Mentor Clo Bougard; LSA Art Room Gallery and LSA Trustees  

The friends, family and support networks of all graduating artists!

Lead image: courtesy Jo Gelsthorpe