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.

Ayeshah Zolghadr

MA Printmaking

I am a fine artist working at the interface of printmaking, exploring relationships and communication through repetitive action. My interdisciplinary practice is heavily influenced by an architectural background, mathematical investigations and an interest in augmenting digital technologies. Working across parallel processes, I am interested in unforeseen shifts that occur from translating my experimental print-based works into 3D forms and back again. Operating at varying scales and working in series or multiples, I explore my ideas and research through risograph printmaking, etching and blind embossing, which I extended into sculptural forms. I often draw upon sound and moving image throughout the process of making and consider the outcomes of my work as visual databases. The reproducible nature of the mediums I engage with echo technological reproduction and offer a means for me to reconcile tensions between the analogue and the digital, and temporality.

A key concern of my practice is the reframing of printmaking as a liminal site of interdisciplinarity in the context of examining the surfaces between adjacent disciplines. For me, this manifests in a visual conversation with the abstraction of the grid informed by the rhythm of reproducible printmaking processes. Drawing on theory from sociology, and science and technology studies, I recognise the grid as a boundary object — a form of information that can be examined in differing ways, scales and by differing audiences. A defining feature of such boundary objects is their ability to ‘tack back and forth’ between being specific and abstract, which aligns with tracing the (re)translation of my own works back and forth between 2D and 3D in the pursuit of ‘individuated copies’.

Translating The Individuated Copy investigates the translation of the grid as a boundary object. This work continues themes identified in my ongoing research, which is concerned with ideas surrounding augmenting technology, ‘the individuated copy’ and notions of ‘indirect’ gesture. The project is process-led, working initially without a fixed outcome to allow processes to define the direction of the research. Exploring the autotelic nature of process as outcome also informs my line of inquiry.Transitions and (re)translations between 2D and 3D and back again trigger investigations surrounding reproducibility and the liminal spaces between 2D and 3D. Iterative grids are continuously abstracted through risograph, blind embossed, relief and intaglio printmaking, in parallel with ceramics, plaster casting and laser-etched experiments in acrylic. The result is an expanding body of research surrounding interdisciplinary practice, mark making, and how printmaking might function at the boundaries of other disciplines.

The final body of work documents a physical visual database that traces my iterative process, comprising a series of large-scale, floor-based, giclée prints; a grid-based, curated collection of 2D and 3D works of varying scales that function as a record of the methods used in the making of the large-scale works; a custom-made, pantograph drawing machine; a series of large-scale drawings made from the pantograph; and a video work of the pantograph in action.