The foundation process

Going through the several rotations of the foundation course, with a taste of the main 4 disciplines they teach there, I tried my best at each, trying to find out what I wanted to do. Although I enjoyed fine art and knew I was fairly good at it, I never saw myself persuing it as a career, for the fact of it being hard to earn money, but also knowing I’ll have the pressure to produce work that was commercial enough to sell but also knowing that I may not be able to create the work that I wanted to produce, so I kept an open mind. Also, having studied product design at A Level and gaining an A in that, I did well and enjoyed that too, with my drawing, visualising and ideas skills coming in useful there, however my heart wasn’t into it as much. Product design at Chelsea came under the title of 3D/Spatial design. The textile design rotation was the only one that made it clear I didn’t want to do that, although it was useful in that they introduced me to continuous line drawing which was quite fun to do. Fine art was quite different at Chelsea, it was a lot more abstract and conceptual, not being totally sure what was expected from you and what was considered good and bad, we were mainly left to our own devices. I ended up for my main piece making more of an installation artwork, combining paintings with ready made objects, creating a statement about how commercialism has become so ridiculous in certain aspects, but I didn’t really know what I was doing, and it confirmed to myself that it wasn’t the best option for me.

This left me with the other remaining rotation of Visual communication, which was actually the first rotation I started with. This was very broad but intriguing, as the closest thing I’d done to this before was Graphic Design during GCSE but was still completely different in many ways. Visual communication was about ideas, visual language, composition, narrative, opinion, saying something, and I found myself quite enjoying it. Before we had to decide what we wanted to specialise in, after merely 8 weeks of being on the course, we had the task of producing a piece of writing of 500 words to explain our journeys and to state what and why I wanted to specialise in it. Through this and talking to one of the staff for the feedback and assessment of my work, it was decided that I try Visual Communication, and if after a week or so I decided I didn’t like it, I could try out fine art. From here, we were given our first tasks (40 in fact!) to complete over the Christmas break, and I haven’t looked back from there..