WeAreMA: Model Making Project

We Are MA looks at the diverse practices and backgrounds of NUA’s MA students. MA Fine Art Subject Leader Desmond Brett shares the work created by his students from a lockdown model making project.

As part of their Platforms for Dialogue unit, MA Fine Art students took part in a project to consider how the model might be explored and utilised as a platform in relation to their own particular practices.

This project was a provocation to think of the model in more expansive terms, from the resolutely architectural towards more speculative and propositional structures. 

Work above by: Catherine Blydenstein, Gill Browning, Paul Zawadzki, Amy Allcroft, Philippa Champain.

Because of the lockdown situation, each student was sent a model pack in the post containing materials with which to execute their ideas on a small scale: foam, wire, Modroc, figures, tape and more.

They were invited to use these material in any way they saw fit with no restrictions or limitations on what the model could be. 

Work above by: David Greeves, Beth Stilgoe, Holly Sandiford, Jade Squires, Thomas Longdin.

The outcomes were truly astonishing: students designed models that anticipated future exhibition spaces; magical immersions; locations of intersectionality; spaces to exhibit failure; test sites for visualising quantum experiments; cliffs as open-air galleries; buildings that transform; re-presentations of the picturesque; encounters dissolving audience/performer and models that imagine embodied encounters with materials. 

The willingness to approach the model experimentally and breadth of ambition to create new ways of approaching the art work typify the scope of practice of MA study at Norwich University of the Arts.

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