Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art (MFA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Friday at the framing shop where I work, I sort the week's mount board offcuts by width, and the narrow strips go into a box I am allowed to take home. For three years those strips have been the starting point of much of my studio practice: thin bevelled edges, cream and grey, each one the leftover of somebody else's decision about how a picture should be held. I want to undertake an MFA because I have reached the point where my work needs sustained time, critical conversation and a clearer account of what it is doing.

I completed a BA in Fine Art with a 2:1. My degree show piece, Tread, began with the worn stone steps of an old mill building near my home. I made plaster casts of six step edges, then wove strips of cotton tape across the casts so that the dips worn by feet showed as slack and tension in the weave. The piece was not entirely resolved. Plaster cracked where the weave pulled too tightly, and I left those cracks in. My tutors pushed me to explain why weaving belonged with casting, and my answer became the core of my current interest: both processes record repeated action over time, one by accumulation and one by erosion. Reading Tim Ingold's Making in my final year gave me language for thinking of materials as active rather than passive, and I still return to it when deciding how far to control a surface.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a picture framer. The job has given me practical skills I did not learn at university: cutting accurate bevels, conservation mounting, handling fragile works on paper and talking to customers about what they want an object to do on a wall. It has also made me attentive to the frame as an edge between an image and the world, which is why I started working with offcuts. My recent series arranges mount strips into low reliefs pinned a few centimetres from the wall, so that their shadows do as much work as the card. I have shown four of these in a group exhibition at a café gallery and in an open studio weekend.

On Tuesday evenings I volunteer at a community print studio, cleaning rollers, preparing paper and helping beginners register multi-colour linocuts. I enjoy the shared, slightly chaotic rhythm of it, and watching people work has made me less precious about my own process. Several of my relief pieces now include monoprinted card pulled from the studio's spare press time.

Outside art, I look after my younger brother, who has a learning disability, most weekends so my mother can rest. We walk the canal towpath together, and he collects flat stones he likes the feel of. I would not call that research, but it has quietly shaped how I think about touch, repetition and the value of objects nobody else has chosen.

What I lack is structured critique and the confidence to work at a larger scale. Working alone after a full day's framing, I tend to make small, careful pieces and stop before they become risky. I want to test whether the logic of Tread and the offcut reliefs can extend to installation, perhaps casting sections of floor in public buildings and pairing them with woven or printed responses. I would also like to develop my writing, since articulating why I make things has always lagged behind making them.

I am bringing reliable technical skill, a habit of working steadily alongside employment, and a body of work with a clear direction that still has plenty of open questions. I am ready to spend two years answering some of them in company with other artists.