Contemporary Art Practice MA (eca) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the framing shop where I work, I spend a large part of each day deciding how much empty space should surround someone else's picture. A child's drawing, a wedding photograph, a print bought on holiday: each arrives with an owner who has strong feelings and few words for them, and my job is to find a mount width and moulding that lets the thing breathe. After three years, I have come to think of this as a quiet form of curatorial judgement, and it has changed how I approach my own work. I am applying for postgraduate study in contemporary art practice because I want to test that judgement against a more demanding critical context than I can build alone.

My undergraduate degree in Fine Art moved me from painting towards installation and lens-free photography. My degree show piece began with the bus shelters on my route to college, whose timetable panels had faded unevenly in the sun. I photographed and measured twenty of them over a winter, then made large cyanotypes by exposing fabric behind salvaged transparent signage, letting daylight do the same slow work the shelters recorded. The finished installation hung the prints at shelter height, with a bench borrowed from the council depot after several polite emails. Tutors were most encouraging about the research process; the most useful criticism was that the work explained itself too thoroughly through its wall text. I have been thinking about that ever since, and I want to learn how to trust materials and placement to carry more of the meaning.

Since graduating I have kept a studio practice going in a shared space above a bike repair shop. I have continued working with cyanotype but have started combining it with offcuts from the framing shop: mount board bevels, discarded glass, the cardboard corners that protect frames in transit. These small assemblages are about protection and display, about the material that normally disappears so that an image can be seen. I have shown three of them in a group exhibition organised by artists from my studio building, and I helped hang the whole show, which taught me more about sightlines and lighting than any amount of reading.

Reading has mattered too. Rosalind Krauss's essay on sculpture in the expanded field gave me a vocabulary for work that is neither quite object nor quite site, and Lucy Lippard's writing on the dematerialisation of the art object made me look again at how much of my practice depends on process rather than outcome. I would like to read more widely in writing on photography and duration, and to have my assumptions argued with by peers who work very differently from me.

One evening a week I volunteer at a community print workshop, where I help adults, many new to printmaking, set up screens and mix inks. It is not glamorous, but explaining exposure times to a retired joiner or a teenager on a school holiday has made me clearer about my own methods, and it has reminded me that technical knowledge is something to share rather than guard. Outside art, I swim in a local reservoir most of the year, which has given me patience with cold, slow change and weather, and probably explains my interest in sunlight as a material.

I am ready for the structure that postgraduate study offers: sustained studio time, regular critique and the pressure of developing a body of work over a defined period. I hope to push my practice towards larger, site-responsive installations that rely less on explanation, and to develop the critical writing that would let me discuss my work with confidence. I bring a disciplined working habit, practical skills in handling and presenting work, and a genuine curiosity about what happens at the edges of an image.