Student Open Call 2016: Highly Commended

Student Open Call: Highly Commended

As part of our programme to encourage and help develop the work of emerging artists, we invited undergraduate art students from Newcastle, Northumbria and Sunderland University to submit exhibition proposals to showcase their work at The Holy Biscuit. We were inundated with high quality entries from students working in a broad range of media. Our successful artists are Rowan Mills and Phoebe McElhatton, whose exhibition ‘Playing Footsie’ is showing at The Holy Biscuit until 3rd March 2016.

It was only possible to choose one proposal to be developed into an exhibition, but we wanted to share some of the other entries we were impressed by.

Jack Kemp, Jamie Hammil & Tom Patel

Jack, Jamie and Tom are second year students studying Fine Art at Newcastle University. Although each artist is motivated by different interests, their works have similarities in colour and form which gave a sense of visual coherence to their proposed exhibition.

Jack Kemp is interested in the expanded field of painting, combining both painting and sculpture to “abstract everyday objects until they become unknown”. His playful work heavily features found objects, which he attempts to strip of their ordinary connotations within their new compositions.

Jack Kemp

Jamie Hammill’s work also has a humorous edge, challenging the over seriousness which can be found in the art world. He seeks to question the roles and motivations of the artist as a maker, and whether the production of artwork is an egotistical act.

Jamie Hammill

Tom Patel’s work focuses on naturally occurring detail and texture, as opposed to visual detail based on pixels. These works are illusionistic, appearing 3D despite their 2D nature. His use of bright, contrasting colours or black and white visually compliments both Jack and Jamie’s work.

Tom Patel Tom Patel