Creative Visual Arts (MFA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the picture framer's where I work, every mitre cut leaves a small wedge of moulding on the floor. For two years I have been keeping them. I now have three shoeboxes of oak, ash, gilt and painted pine, sorted by colour, and over the last year they have become the main material of my studio practice: small relief constructions that frame nothing, or frame the wall itself. I want to undertake an MFA because this work has reached the point where I need sustained time, critical conversation and the pressure of other artists' thinking to take it further.

My BA in Fine Art gave me a grounding in printmaking and installation. My degree show project developed from my family's allotment. I made large cyanotypes by laying old shed windows, seed trays and netting directly onto treated paper on the plot itself, so that weather, shadow and the time of day shaped each print. Some sheets were spoiled by rain, and I chose to show several of those alongside the clearer ones because the blotches recorded the conditions honestly. Writing the accompanying essay, I read Rosalind Krauss's 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field', and her argument that sculpture could be defined by its relationships to landscape and architecture rather than by a fixed medium helped me think about the prints as records of a site rather than images of it. My tutors' feedback was that the work was strongest when it was most physical, and I have taken that seriously since.

Framing has given me an unexpected second education. I measure, cut, join and fit glass for customers who bring in everything from wedding photographs to children's drawings to inherited watercolours. I have learned to work to a millimetre, to talk people through choices of mount and moulding without imposing my taste, and to notice how strongly a frame changes what a viewer believes an object is worth. A felt-tip drawing in a deep gilt frame is treated with a reverence that the same drawing pinned to a fridge never receives. That observation sits at the centre of my current pieces, which borrow the language of the frame to question where an artwork begins and ends.

Since graduating I have kept a studio routine around work and family responsibilities. Three afternoons a week I collect my younger brother from school and stay with him until our mother finishes her shift, so I have become disciplined about using early mornings and Sundays in a shared studio space above a carpet warehouse. There I have made around forty small reliefs and two larger wall pieces, one of which was shown in a group exhibition the studio organised for an open weekend. Watching visitors lean in to read the grain and joins, and then step back to see the wall between the pieces, showed me the work functions at two distances, something I want to develop deliberately.

On Saturdays I work on a friend's secondhand records stall at the local market. It has nothing to do with my practice directly, but it has made me comfortable talking with strangers and taught me how people browse: quickly, by touch, stopping only when something catches the hand as well as the eye.

At postgraduate level I want to test whether my reliefs can operate at architectural scale without losing the intimacy of the offcut, and to strengthen the writing and research that underpin them. I expect to be challenged in critiques, and I want that; my practice has developed largely alone, and I know its blind spots will be clearer to others than to me. I bring practical skill, steady working habits and a body of work with a clear direction, and I am ready to commit to two years of serious, questioning study.