The root of the word control is the Latin contrarotulus meaning a register, counter, or record of something. CTRL, an abbreviation of control, is synonymous with a digital key which when combined with other keys, carries out an instruction, a shortcut, an action. 

The 2022 graduating BA Fine Art students are a group who are full of ideas and things to say – the issues they are dealing with are both complex and important. Their exhibition CTRL is the result of a series of commands, manifest through creativity, technical skill, and an understanding of the potential functionality of art practice in what it can say and how it comes to be. Many of the student’s individual practices explore issues of identity, memory and loss, culture, heritage, environment, communication, and the foregrounding of marginalised voices. Their outcomes are in many ways connected through a sense of being and belonging – to personal, social, and political contexts. The impact of the global pandemic has clearly had a profound effect on the concerns they have chosen to explore and the variety of ways in which they have sought to communicate to audiences. In this, the first School of Art Degree Show since 2019, we see a group that have navigated challenges to present an exhibition that is tactile, physical, ambitious, and energetic. The sense of possibility of the works gives us much to celebrate, to be hopeful about and to reflect on.

Rebecca Court

BA Fine Art Course Leader