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.

Jenny Seabrook

MA Fine Art and MA Printmaking

I am a multi-disciplinary artist with many interests, but my recent work is predominantly sculptural.

I am interested in how objects are experienced in the world, and the interplay between the natural and unnatural, or ‘uncanny’. Inspired by natural forms and found-objects, my practice involves a bringing-together of these things to highlight the beauty and diversity of the world around us – the curious and the wonderful.

I challenge perceptions to show how something that could be viewed as unsettling can be beautiful. My work has a strong curatorial element. Nostalgia and personal memories are important themes in my practice, and I often incorporate collected objects that I have held onto for years.

I am concerned more with shape and materiality than colour, recently working predominantly in white to emphasise this. As my work becomes larger and occupies more physical space, it has a stronger connection with the human body and has become more theatrical through a sense of immersion that connects more directly to the viewer. There is a playfulness and humour which is often abstract. I work in an exploratory way that is hard to define, choosing instead to let the viewer to find their own interpretation.

My work for TOUCHDOWN is a culmination of my exploration into the concept of the artist as collector. Taking inspiration from my own collection of ephemera and natural objects and drawing on the concept of the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ I have created a series of curio sculptures that form an immersive installation of abstract shapes and forms that will leave the viewer questioning what they are looking at.

By choosing to make most of my pieces in a uniform white colour, I aim to emphasis shape over context, to downplay their materiality and to further blur the lines of what they are supposed to represent (if anything). The sculptures retain an uncanny sense of familiarity. There is often a hint of the natural objects that inspired them, but they are unique and distinct, and I enjoy that fact that they leave the interpretation open. The chalky white paint masks clay, wood, wire and paper alike, so that the emphasis is once again on the form. Is what we are looking at a depiction of the animal, vegetable or mineral… and does it even matter?

I hope that my work imparts a sense of wonder and an appreciation of aesthetics that highlights the beauty of the world, as well as its fragility.