MA fine art students at Chichester University invite you in!

The MA fine art students at Chichester University are promising a treat for the eyes when they open their doors to the public for three weeks to show their work.
The artistsThe artists
The artists

Their exhibition runs from January 24-February 7 from 11am-4pm, and entry is free.

The venue is the ArtOne building on the Bishop Otter campus in Chichester.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“The artists this year come from a variety of experiences and age groups so the exhibition promises to be an interesting mix of styles and creativity, including paintings, sculpture, film and assemblage,” says Rachel Baylis, who is relishing her time in Chichester as a mature student.

“Selsey artist Nicola Aspin will be exhibiting her glorious paintings based on fabrics from her childhood. She is also an acclaimed story-writer, having won a children’s book writing competition in a national newspaper a few years ago. Most impressively, when she was five she had a drawing of a rabbit exhibited on the children’s TV show Play School, but arrived home too late to see it!

“Another exhibitor, Madeline Landauer, having been a film maker (her film in the space between chaos and shape appeared in the Osaka Senior Women’s Film Festival last year) is now focusing on assemblage installations, using found materials to create time-based and impermanent works.

“Sculptor Charlotte Mccarthy (born and bred in Bognor Regis), while volunteering at the Cass Sculpture Foundation by Goodwood, bumped into Mr Cass himself – Charlotte was washing a sculpture, and he thought she was watering the plants!

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Noni Needs helps Petersfield radio by producing podcast interviews from local people about their favourite recipes. Having worked for 16 years in publishing, she is relishing the opportunity to spend more time on her creativity.”

Also exhibiting is Lucy Carter: “While exhibiting her BA work at the Oxmarket Gallery a few years ago, she was delighted when the current mayor bought one of her prints for the Mayor’s Parlour.”

As for Rachel, who lives in Bognor Regis, she was in the children’s Royal Academy in London in 1970. She also used to run the arts show on Portsmouth’s Express FM Radio and The Great Art Expedition in London. She also used to run a book shop in Fareham.

Rachel did a BA at Reading in the 1980s: “I was a painter for a while and moved to London, but I had to have a career. I had a need to make some money and so I became various things including a housing officer. But I did set up The Great Art Expedition and so I was moving back towards art. I was finding my way. I had a family and then I moved down south and bought a bookshop in Fareham which I sold in 2001. We were very naïve! Amazon was just starting when we started out!”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Now has been the first time financially she has been able to go back to do her MA. She looked at three places to study and liked Chichester’s tutors best.

“I am very much enjoying it. It is quite daunting going back to university after all these years. At first it was really befuddling and unsettling, and I didn’t think I could hack it, but then it all started clicking into place. The tutors were saying that they didn’t expect us to know what we wanted to do right at the start and that it would probably all change by the end of the course.”

The exhibition will show where the students are right now: “The exhibition is part of the course. It is meant to be a module about doing a group exhibition. It is about how we get on as a group, and it has been very interesting, having to concentrate on getting something finished in time. It has been very useful in that respect. It is all about the process, but at some point you still have to finish your work and show your work.”