Applied arts personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What draws me to applied arts is the moment an object stops being a picture of an idea and starts being used. I made a set of four beakers last winter from a bag of buff stoneware, hand-built because I had no wheel, and the second one warped where I had pressed the wall too thin. My family still uses them every morning. Watching the glaze wear slightly at the rim taught me more about design than any drawing I have made, because the object kept giving feedback after I had finished it. I want to study a course where making is the method of thinking rather than the illustration of a finished plan. My college course has given me a good grounding in composition, colour and critical writing, but it is built around two-dimensional work and digital outcomes. I have had to look outwards for materials knowledge, and that searching is precisely what has convinced me: I enjoy the slow, technical, unglamorous part. Reading Edmund de Waal's writing on pots, particularly his attention to how a vessel is held and set down, helped me articulate why I keep returning to containers rather than sculpture. I am also interested in how craft handles repair. Mending my grandmother's tablecloth with visible stitching, rather than hiding the darn, changed how I judge quality; the repair became part of the object's history instead of an apology for it. On a degree I want access to kilns, glaze chemistry, wood and metal, and to tutors who will tell me when my forms are timid. I want to test whether my interest in containers holds up when I have proper equipment, and to learn to cost, weigh and repeat work so that making could become a living rather than only an evening.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My BTEC Extended Diploma has been useful in ways I did not expect. The research and contextual studies units taught me to write about work without inflating it, and I now annotate my own sketchbooks with what failed and why, not just what looked good. A unit on surface and pattern led me to collect rubbings and photographs of local brickwork, including the diaper patterns on a Victorian pumping station near the canal, and I translated those grids into slip-trailed decoration on press-moulded tiles. Working at a small scale forced me to think about registration and repeat, which is a discipline drawing alone had not demanded of me. A level Geography has been a surprising support. Units on resource use and urban change gave me vocabulary for something I already felt about materials: that clay, willow and reclaimed timber all come from somewhere and carry a cost. I wrote a fieldwork report on land use along a stretch of canal and spent two afternoons counting and sketching what had been left behind by former industry. That habit of systematic observation, of recording before interpreting, now shapes how I begin a project. I chose to teach myself basketry using library books and free willow offcuts from an allotment neighbour who coppices his own. My first frame basket was lopsided, so I made three more, timing each stage and noting how soaking time changed the willow's behaviour. Keeping that record was closer to a Geography practical than an art project, and it has made me better at both. I am comfortable with technical reading, measurement and revision, and I expect a degree in applied arts to demand all three.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Since last spring I have worked Saturdays and Sundays at a garden centre, mostly on the tills but also watering, moving stock and rearranging the pot displays. Handling hundreds of terracotta and glazed planters has taught me a lot about production: which glazes craze, where handles break in transit, how price relates to weight and wall thickness. Customers ask blunt questions about whether something will survive a frost, and I have had to learn honest answers. Serving people has also made me less precious about my own work; I can now talk about what I have made without either apologising or overselling it. My practice at home is deliberately low-cost. I work on a board over the kitchen table, dry pieces in an airing cupboard and pay for firings at a community studio's monthly open session, which means I have to plan a batch carefully because I only get one chance a month. That constraint has been good for me. I now make test tiles for every glaze and keep a notebook of recipes, firing dates and results, including the batch where three lids shrank differently from their pots. I look after my younger brother on weekday evenings while my mother works, and we often make things together from packaging card and string. Explaining how to score a fold or dampen willow so it bends has improved my ability to break a process into steps, which I think will matter in group workshops. Outside making, I volunteer twice a term at a community litter pick along the towpath, partly because it is where I collect the photographs and fragments that end up in my sketchbooks. I am practical, patient with repetitive tasks and used to organising my own time around work and family, and I am ready to take on a full workshop-based course.

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