Fine art postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of my working week is spent cutting window mounts in a frame shop on a busy high street. Customers bring in wedding photographs, children's drawings, football shirts and occasionally a watercolour by an aunt who painted for forty years without showing anyone. Before I cut, I measure how much margin the work needs, and I have come to think of that margin as a decision about attention. That habit has followed me back into my own practice, and it is one reason I want to undertake a postgraduate degree in fine art now rather than continue working alone.

I completed a BA in Fine Art three years ago, specialising in printmaking. My final project was a series of thirty cyanotypes made along a two-mile stretch of canal towpath near where I grew up. I collected plants, litter and lengths of fishing line, laid them on treated paper and exposed them in the open air, sometimes washing the prints in canal water, which shifted the blues towards grey and green. The series was shown in the degree exhibition as a long, unframed strip pinned at eye height. Looking back, its strength was the patience of the process; its weakness was that I treated the towpath mainly as a source of material rather than thinking about who used it and why. My tutors pushed me on this in my final review, and it has shaped what I have done since.

After graduating I kept working, though more slowly. I rented a shared print studio one evening a week and began making photogravures from my own photographs of the same canal, this time including people: anglers, a man who cycles the length of it every morning, a group of teenagers who meet under one bridge. I asked permission each time, and the conversations often became more interesting than the images. I have started recording short notes about them alongside the prints, and I am unsure yet whether text belongs in the work or should remain a private record. That uncertainty is something I would like time and critical discussion to resolve.

The studio also runs a monthly open print night, which I have helped organise for the past eighteen months. I set up the presses, prepare simple lino blocks for beginners and clean up afterwards. Explaining registration to someone who has never printed has made me clearer about my own technical choices, and watching people with no art training make confident decisions has loosened my idea of what counts as a finished print.

Outside art, I mend and alter clothes, mostly for friends. It is practical work, but it has taught me to look at seams, wear and repair as evidence of how something has been lived with, and I suspect that interest in visible repair is quietly entering my prints.

My reading has been uneven but persistent. John Berger's Ways of Seeing first made me question how framing and context change meaning, which felt very direct given my job. More recently I have been looking at artists who work with walking and place, and at the history of the cyanotype from Anna Atkins's botanical books onwards.

What I need now is sustained studio time, rigorous critique from peers and staff, and an environment where I am expected to articulate why I make the choices I do. I am particularly interested in studying in a different country, where the landscape and the social uses of shared spaces will be unfamiliar, because I think it would make me examine assumptions I have carried from one stretch of canal. I bring a reliable work ethic, solid technical printmaking skills and experience of working with the public, and I am ready for my practice to be questioned and to change.