UCA and Crate Student Graduate Award

Welcome to our three recipients from UCA for the UCA and Crate Graduate Award.

Sara Jackson, Louisa Clements and Damian Cockton are all graduating students from UCA who have been invited to spend a month at the Crate Project Space to further their artistic practices and present a public outcome. They are currently busy working down at Crate, so please feel free to drop in and introduce yourself to them.

Meet the Grads:

Sara Jackson

"My interest in materials help me explore and interact with the surrounding environment. Surface, texture, form, movement, space and light are the key interests in my practice. My work borders between the boundaries of the accident and control, with my fascination of sunlight’s interactions with space. The angled sunlight running across my space was the first trigger of intrigue, from this time (transience) started to become a focus. It is important to me for the audience to feel activated by the work and with the work responding to its location and playing with the notion of transience, the audience is able to engage. By creating collections of work, it allows me to experiment with compositions and see which works have the best relationship. Play is an important factor to the making and installing of the work and because of this it allows there to be an energy in the work, that it feels in a state of flux."

Damian Cockton

 "My current practice is derived from a conversation about 'the sound a shape makes' - basically, we have reactions to shape and form and surface. Whether anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, cultural or to do with our life experience. Our brains naturally look for patterns and familiarity. This can operate on a real base level to quite deep intellectual understandings and references. Basically, it is our desire to find familiarity in our visual world to feel safe. My work plays with these notions in form, shape and surface. The work looks at our duality in modern day life. The work is in creating a response from the viewer getting them to create their own dialogue, narrative."

Lousia Clements

"My current practice is an explorative journey of concrete’s material qualities and the questioning of its role as a fine art material. What I love about concrete is its unapologetic nature; even the way in which things are referred to as “set in concrete”, influences me. My work distorts the often negative view of concrete as an unsightly and cumbersome material. Through playful and experimental qualities I hope to reveal new insights into the material. Experimentation is key to my work as it further develops my understanding of and relationship to the material. Process is immensely important to me, I have ad-hoc methods of making which reveals new insights into the material. My ad-hoc making process is emphasised by experimentation with moulds to explore different forms and textures."