The Great Exhibition 2007 - Royal College of Art Summer Show

Fine Art in the Great Exhibition

This year's Fine Art exhibition has been described by Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner and collector, as 'the best RCA degree show for years'.

Painting, Photography and Printmaking are showing the work of graduating and research students together in one exhibition, to mark the special 150 year anniversary. Sculpture, the fourth department from the School of Fine Art, has already exhibited in Battersea due to the scale and possibilities of the Howie Street site for large work.

The current philosophy of the School of Fine Art is that its four departments offer specialisms. Each department engages with an in-depth study of the discipline, understood as discourse constituted by a dynamic history of practices and theories. The specificity of each discipline also includes a necessary interdisciplinarity.

This year's show intends to demonstrate the necessary overlaps and relations between each discipline. A departure from all previous approaches, the departments have taken an overview together, and worked towards a unique and special meeting, a common ground. This is not a group exhibition of works, but of individual practices in a group. The work is woven together as one, and not separated by subject. The approaches are diverse, as are the media and scale of works, each artist pursuing her or his own practice uniquely, to their own ends. What binds the works together is their seriousness and depth, and qualities of real promise. Some projects are made and installed especially for this exhibition, whilst others are invested and produced across time.

My work exhibited in this show

Untitled Black Photograph #4 2007 65x81"

Grey Card - Almost 18% CMY 2007 40x50"

Self Portrait in Black #2 2007 40x50"

In thinking about photography, I think about the depiction of reality and its picture, the materiality of this picture and the context in which a viewer might encounter it. A photograph has as its referent a place within the real and to place a photograph without this referent places it within the realms of the imagination. In that imagination an image can be formed. A black photograph exists as a photograph of nothing. It has an ambiguous symbolism; the void creates a space within which the viewer can reflect upon himself or herself and the space in which the photograph is placed.

More information on this show and my fellow students who graduated at the same time as me is available on the RCA show website