Art (Art History), MA postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

When a customer brings a print into the framing workshop where I work, the first thing I do is turn it over. Last spring an elderly man brought in a hand-coloured engraving of a Warwickshire market town, and the back held three generations of labels: a Victorian printseller's stamp, a 1930s framer's ticket and a biro note reading 'Mum's, from the hall'. Removing the old backing board without destroying that sequence took most of an afternoon. It also clarified something I had been circling since my undergraduate degree. I am most interested in what happens to images after they leave the artist: how they are reproduced, sold, displayed and kept, and how those uses change what they mean.

My BA in Art History gave me a broad grounding, from medieval manuscript illumination to post-war abstraction, but my dissertation drew me towards public and everyday art. I studied three murals commissioned for civic buildings in Coventry during the 1950s rebuilding. Working from council minutes in the city archive, local newspaper reports and my own photographs of the surviving works, I argued that the murals were judged by councillors less on artistic grounds than on whether they suited buildings meant to look modern and hopeful. One mural had been painted over in the 1980s, and reconstructing its appearance from a single newspaper photograph taught me how much careful visual analysis can recover from poor evidence, and where it has to stop. My supervisor encouraged me to be more cautious about claims of intention, and redrafting the final chapter around what the documents actually supported made it the strongest part of the work.

Since graduating I have worked full time at the framing workshop. The job is practical: cutting mounts, advising on conservation glass, explaining to customers why acidic card yellows paper. Yet it has sharpened my looking. I handle photographs, embroidered samplers, children's paintings and the occasional oil sketch, and I now notice paper weights, printing processes and earlier repairs almost automatically. I have read around this alongside the work, including Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, whose idea of the 'period eye' made me think about how my customers and my Coventry councillors each brought their own habits of seeing to an image.

On alternate Saturdays I am on the volunteer guide rota at a medieval parish church near my home. Guiding is modest work, mainly welcoming visitors and pointing out the fragments of wall painting and the Victorian glass, but writing a new two-page visitor leaflet with another volunteer meant checking every claim in the old one against the church's records. Several dates turned out to be guesses repeated for decades. Explaining a faded painting to a family with young children is a different skill from writing an essay, and I have come to value both.

Outside work I play fiddle in a ceilidh band that performs at village halls and weddings, which has nothing to do with art history but has made me comfortable standing in front of a room, and I keep a sketchbook, mostly of buildings, because drawing slows me down enough to notice structure.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want the methods and time to pursue these questions properly. I hope to develop research on how reproductions and commissioned public works circulated and were valued in the twentieth century, and to strengthen my skills in archival research, visual analysis and art historical theory, which I have so far approached largely on my own. I would also welcome the chance to gain teaching or curatorial experience. I bring careful handling of objects, patience with incomplete records and the habit of turning a picture over to see what its history has left behind.