This Thursday i was forbidden to come onto Campus. The markers were in!
On Monday/Tuesday I was required to set up an exhibition of key works, informed by my prior Contextual Studies Paper and oral presentation at a Post Grad Critique.
At 5.30pm i was allowed back on campus for post exam drinkies - a pleasant hour and a half where friends and gallery owners could peruse and ponder this year's crop. My allotted exhibition space was modest but enabled me to put up eight of the sixty-odd works i have created over the last three years. Adjoining my area were several other gallery alcoves where fellow students had set up their assessment exhibitions - mainly installations. The pics below tell a little of the story.
Meanwhile, in a neighbouring lecture theatre, i had piled up the other 52 (called 'support materials' - a vaguely dismissive term, i always thought), and my journals.
I won't find out the result until the end of November when i will be given a grade and written report. But on the night people were very kind. Though i still really have no sense of the merit or otherwise of what i done.
So my biggest lift came when one of the staff actually BOUGHT one of my paintings from the exhibition!
| Harry Kent, Dark night, oil on board, 60x90cm. SOLD |
What pleased me so much was the genuine engagement with the image that this purchase signified. And that the buyer, a man of quiet intensity, is someone i respect. Until that moment, it had felt rather strange to have strangers wander past my agonised self portraits like they were window-shoppers and i was one of the consumables of the evening. There is Blood in these works, my blood. But on the night, it's all quips and smiles as we enter into a tacit conspiracy that life is simply one entertainment after another.
So now i read through the reams of instructions for the graduation ceremony (assuming i will be graduating) with all those icky arrangements for Gown hire etc. I think i'll just pull my doctoral gown and hood out of moth balls and save myself $160 gown hire.Hoping my fellow graduands won't mind.
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