MA Fine Art student gets awarded the University’s highly reputable ‘Vice Chancellor Prize’ for her performance-meets-fine art working practice.
The Vice Chancellor 2013 Prize for Fine Art has been awarded to The School of Music and Fine Art’s postgraduate student Natasha Pocock who successfully completed her MA in Fine Art for her collaborative performance and Fine Art based degree show work, showcased at the School’s Degree Show held at the Historic Dockyard Chatham in May.
Pocock’s piece was a working practice that explored issues of identity and passage of time through textiles, sculpture and performance with a focus on Dockyard-specific history. Her work was articulated through the process of garment construction, where the manipulation of materials and non-material realities were forged together to form a sense of place and presence. Through conducting a force of energy through integral threading, interweaving and vocal dialogue, thinking in an established rhythm to problem solving and problem-finding, Pocock literally ‘took matters into her own hands’, with the fusion of materials, process and techniques.
The site-specific industrial and historical male dominance of naval presence brought a nostalgic reference to notions of resilience, determination, devotion, loss and separation as Pocock utilised the illusion of performances in life and highlighted the fragility of memory. The work also reflected the imprisonment to duty and working with closed fixed systems of craft production. The Craftsperson battling from being ‘swallowed’ by the machine, through continuous strokes by attaching the power of manipulation to established systems, thus showing the Master Craftsperson is instinctively a crafter in all that can be manipulated and working with resistance being the key to survival.
As part of the Vice Chancellor Prize, Natasha Pocock will be asked to replicate the ethos behind the works in a new piece for display, based on her degree show work at the University of Kent, we look forward to seeing her new piece.
