Past Present.

Welcome to our shows from 2020-2023.

This is a showcase of work by students in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University, who graduated from 2020 to 2022.

It's all of us, together, in a digital show you curate for yourself - not pre-arranged into rooms, courses or disciplines. You do the arranging. Want to see all the red things we made? Or all the work about identity, nature or isolation? Look at what you want to, when you want to, whether it's all the illustration, all the writing, all the movies or performance. You get the idea.

This exhibition is yours for the making. Go explore.

For more information about our faculty, visit the ARU website.
Whilst Anglia Ruskin University remains committed to freedom of speech for individuals, the views and opinions included in this showcase belong to their authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Anglia Ruskin University. If you've got any concerns please contact us.

Fernando Cari

Fine Art - BA (Hons)

My work explores the interconnections among painting, sculpture, stage design and architecture. The key theme is 'theatricality'; the viewer switches between the experience of suspending disbelief and being invited to see the artificial construct of the artwork. I use lighting to create contrast and theatrical moments, a quality that can be found in all the media involved in my practice. I design settings with transversal perspectives that generate spatial illusions. The observer is exposed to a form of artifice in which the objects create a narrative through their relationship with each other.

Refraction depicts how we experience light as it travels through transparent substances of different densities, such as glass or water. This bending of light by refraction travels through the lens of the human eye and focuses on our retina. The human eye constantly adjusts to the light, in the same way that a photographer uses different lenses zooming in or out. On the surface of the painting the apparent monochromatic palette hides underneath it the spectrum of rainbow colours that can only be seen when inspecting the canvas at close range. This echoes Newton's experiment with a prism and sunlight, in which he split the light into its component colours. The angles of the confined architectural space and the duality of the gridlines on the exterior demarcate the direction in which light waves travel from air to glass, with the glass representing the threshold into the freedom and warmth beyond. In this way it is symbolic of the progression from photorealism to the full sensorial experience of haptic visuality.

My film Semantic Illusion portrays an introspective vision of mobility and emergence responding to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The opening sequence is the movement of clouds through which the light periodically emerges, which is a metaphor seeking clarity. Hands appearing on the screen subvert the logic. This leads the viewer to question reality and to reflect on sensorial relationships between elements such as water, air, and earth, and on metaphysical aspects of the world in which we live. The falling droplets and the people passing by are governed by the laws of gravity, enforcing a dynamic movement within a system in which water nurtures life.

Constructed Landscape invites us to explore the memory and the connection with the reality that we perceive from nature. A set of found and derived organic elements (such as flour, twigs, wood blocks and clay) comprise a structure resisting transformation by the temporal cycles of the seasons. This provokes reflection on existence and mortality. The action of the hands emphasises tactility and brings the design process into focus. This natural environment is constructed from artificial elements that change meaning according to transitions of light, which conveys a sense of time through movement - a cinematographic effect remarked on by Gilles Deleuze.