Students use drawing to highlight global environmental shifts
In 2019, MA Visual Communication students Maia Magoga-Aranovich and Eleanor Wemyss travelled to Portugal and Pembrokeshire as recipients of the Gordon Peter Pickard Drawing Travel Bursary.Â
‘The bursary – awarded annually to first-year Visual Communication students – assists recipients in carrying out a research trip relevant to their study’ explained Anne Howeson, MA Visual Communication Tutor. ‘It promotes the importance of drawing within communication disciplines and helps students realise practice-based research projects that may not have been possible otherwise.’
Maia and Eleanor’s experience is documented in a self-curated exhibition Beneath Our Feet on display in the Hockney Gallery at the RCA in Kensington from 10 to 16 December. As a body of work Beneath Our Feet touches on the impact that global and environmental shifts are having on the landscape and on wider ecological issues.Â
We spoke to Maia and Eleanor about their experiences:
‘The Gordon Peter Pickard travel bursary gave me the opportunity to travel through Portugal, exploring locally grown produce and small-scale farms’ recalled Maia. ‘Although my intentions had been to focus on food within the context of market culture, my interest shifted while I travelled.’ Â‘After speaking to locals who grew their own produce, I realised I wanted to focus on the root of production, on the land itself. I was surrounded by corn fields, pomegranate shrubs, almond trees and lesser-known native plants. The act of harvesting my own food was a simple joy that made me feel intimately tied to the land.’Â
Maia’s experience helped her to create Eating The Outside, a piece of work that was borne out of the connections Maia made on her travels through Portugal between people and landscape. As she explained:‘The closeness I experienced between land, food and body was a tangible reminder that the food we eat is an extension of the landscapes we inhabit. I was taught by local farmers to consider the regeneration of soil as a healing of the land that extends to a healing of human beings.’Â
Eleanor used her bursary to explore a landscape a little closer to home. ‘Pembrokeshire Power Plant dominates the Milford Haven Estuary Landscape’ Eleanor pointed out. ‘It was built in 2012 after many other plants in the area closed down. The vastness of this building has had an impact on tourism in the area and so I spent three weeks exploring what this has done to the land.’
When asked why she chose to investigate this particular landscape, Eleanor explained, ‘the land and surrounding sea has become the most densely populated area of wildlife in Europe. Every day at noon I placed a tunnel with paper on the bottom in different areas around the power plant. I put food sources onto the paper and painted the edges with a mixture of vegetable oil and black food colouring. This formed a series of collaborative drawings with the resident wildlife, proving the importance of areas allowed to grow, uninhabited by human interaction.’Â
The resulting work The Importance of Not Being Present displays a series of drawn and photographic images illustrating spaces where human access is restricted or forbidden.Â
Beneath Our Feet, will be on show in the Hockney Gallery, RCA Kensington Gore from 10 to 16 December.Â
PV: 9 December 5.30–9 pm.Â
The next call for applications for the Gordon Peter Pickard Travel Bursary will be in May 2020, and is open to all first year Visual Communication students.
Applicants should propose practice-based projects, that use travel to inform drawings related to a research area of particular fascination to them. The research remit is unlimited and might investigate environmental, cultural and socio-political issues or narratives of any kind – historical, political or place based. Drawings are made alongside other media in a major or minor role, using any form or method: expanded, traditional, process or outcome.