Fine art postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A woman once brought a flake of paint the size of a thumbnail to the mixing counter where I work and asked for her front door to be matched exactly. The spectrophotometer gave me a formula, but the sample had faded on one side and darkened with grime on the other, so I mixed three test pots and we painted swatches on card in the car park light. She chose the one that matched the door as she remembered it, not the reading. I think about that choice often, because the gap between what a surface records and what people believe it records is where my practice has settled, and it is the question I want to pursue at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in fine art began with painting, but by my second year I was more interested in surfaces that had been made by use than by intention. For my final project I made large frottage rubbings of worn floors: the lino outside a primary school dining hall, the stone steps of a library, the rubber matting at the entrance to a leisure centre. I used graphite and wax on lining paper, working early in the morning with permission from caretakers, and learned quickly that a rubbing flattens depth in misleading ways. A dip worn by decades of feet can disappear entirely, while a shallow scratch shows as a hard black line. Rather than treat this as a failure, I began pairing each rubbing with a plaster cast of a small section of the same floor, so viewers could compare the drawn record with the physical one. The degree show piece, eleven rubbings hung low beside three casts on the gallery floor, was the first work I felt fully belonged to me. My tutors' main criticism was that the installation explained itself too neatly, and I agree; the next stage needs more uncertainty and less demonstration.

Since graduating I have worked full time in the paint department of a DIY store. It is not glamorous, but it has given me a working knowledge of pigment, sheen, base and tint that my studio training never did, and daily practice in listening to people describe colour in their own words: "the green of my nan's kitchen", "white, but not hospital white". I keep a notebook of these descriptions. I have kept a small studio practice going in a shared garage, extending the floor project to the concrete around allotment water troughs, where I share a plot with a neighbour. The troughs are worn in rings by buckets and boots, and I have been testing whether a rubbing can be made in soil pigment rather than graphite, so the material comes from the same place as the mark.

I also drive my younger brother to swimming training three mornings a week, which has meant planning my studio time in short, fixed blocks. I have found I work better that way than I expected, though I know a sustained period of study would let me attempt larger, slower pieces, especially more ambitious casting, which I cannot do safely in a garage.

I have been reading Tim Ingold's Lines, which treats walking, weaving and writing as related ways of making traces, and it has helped me think of a worn floor as something drawn collectively over time rather than simply damaged. I want to test that idea critically, not illustrate it.

What I hope to gain from postgraduate study is rigorous critique, a peer group who will question my assumptions, and the time to develop a body of work in which the record and the memory of a surface stay in productive disagreement. I bring steady studio habits, practical material knowledge and a genuine curiosity about how ordinary people read the places they use every day.