ARTS THREAD Goldsmiths Fine Art 2022: MA Art and Ecology

Above: Goldsmiths Art & Ecology Fine Art 2022 graduate projects 1. Sophie Mayer/ 2-3 Natasha Moody/ 4. Becky Lyon/ 5-6 Fatima Alaiwat

Opening this Thursday 21st July for a PV evening is the Goldsmiths 2022 Postgraduate Degree Exhibition, showcasing students graduating from MFA Fine Art, MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, MA Art & Ecology and Graduate Diploma in Art.

The shows and presentations contain work from a broad range of practices including digital media, film, installation, painting, performance, photography, print, sculpture, sound, textiles and writing.

ARTS THREAD takes a look at the 2022 graduates from Goldsmiths’ MA Art and Ecology course created a range of final projects that explore how contemporary art practices can change our relationship and understanding of the natural world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SyvjMJOi2M

Sophie Mayer’s Queer/ing Coal project examines how through queering the fossil fuel we can change our relationship with it and consider it as a regenerative material, rather than something toxic. The project features a sculpture piece made from coal and brass, resembling a lump of coal that has been pierced with a large hoop septum or earring, and a video with extreme close-ups of coal mixed with saliva.

Natasha Moody takes flowers including lavender, bladder campion flowers and lilies which are then dipped in resin and installed overhead with lights and projections, turning the plants into ethereal hanging sculptures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXHHe98kJwI

Becky Lyon combines scans of the artist’s body printed on acetate and weaves them with pieces of an ancient yew tree. The theme of decay, time and the body is explored further with a site-specific performance piece where the artist, clothed in digital print, sits within a tangle of branches. An additional piece, the Compost Crystal video, shows forest floor fragments cast in compost and ice, documenting their physical changes over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7XUkp2aOnM

Barney Pau’s Fortify takes inspiration from horror films and applies the tension and sinister aspects of horror filmmaking to explore the practices used in contemporary food production. In this video, Pau focuses on the fortification of flour.

Fatima Alaiwat works with sea water collected in Dover to investigate the location’s history as a border, passage and archive. Alaiwat says on their Instagram: ‘The various processes of collecting, processing [the water], eating and digesting are ways I’m interested in playing with to cultivate temporal diversity as a form of resistance to homogenised structures.’

Learn more about the Goldsmiths 2022 Postgraduate Degree Exhibition & the projects on the Goldsmiths website.