Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Getting into shape



Now we’re through Orientation for 2007, have spent some time getting to know our Jewellery colleagues, found studios and received the first briefs for the year, it’s time get into shape for the coming semester.

Given the profound change in the constituency of BDes Object staff and students, the pathway, in order to prosper, will need to anticipate, reconfigure and occupy the critical space between product, sculpture, jewellery & interior design.

Logically and traditionally, the materials and technologies that have been called to account – and continue to be – are wide ranging: ceramics, glass, wood, metals, plastics, resin, weaving, textile, fibre.

An essential focus of your engagement within the Object programme will be conceiving and composing a valid, desirable, sustainable blueprint for designermakers, that will be encouraged and supported by community and stakeholders alike.

We, and I mean that in the collegial ‘we’, are in the business of training as designermakers, and we will need to be seen to practice and engage in the physical world of materials and the production of objects, afresh.

To maintain craft practice and engage with newly (re-) configured complexities/possibilities in the applied and digital arts, the pathway will need to critically, honourably and realistically establish a domain of which it is proud to be the inhabitant.