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It's got a different energy to the other colleges. And I think that's partly to do with where it's located. Camberwell is in South London. There's a sense of community around. And I think that filters in.
Camberwell has always had, as its identity, this idea of using creativity to bring about social change.
A lot of projects we do are really rooted in Camberwell and Peckham. It's really interesting because we get to meet people that work around.
The sustainable exchange project is a project that was situated in Copeland Park just off Peckham Rye. Two of my team members Raheem Sharif and Lucy Eccles identified 11 creative practises. And the students had to make an improvement to make the practise more socially, environmentally sustainable.
The students from UAL have been doing their sustainability project. They've come back and presented an idea for us based on a meeting we had.
We got to have firsthand experience with a partner and then working in a group.
Definitely for us, it's good seeing what the college is up to and seeing the calibre of the students and what they're producing. And they can see what creative industries around near them. We talked about different ideas of sustainability in the studio.
And the students came in this morning to demonstrate a sink trap, which is basically something we put underneath our sink drainage to separate the clay and the water.
I think it's very ambitious. And it teaches us how to do things in a more realistic way.
It's really nice because you're giving back to the local area and local shops.
We're able to work with the community and just see new places around here because a lot of us aren't from London.
The college has fairly consistently worked to reach out to local communities, working with local community groups and with students.
I went to Camberwell from 2016 to 2019. And then three years following that, I opened up satellite store in a Homer's arcade. Started off as a magazine store and then grew to be this project space. For a while, I've been thinking about how I wanted to work with people younger than myself to learn how the students are now working and maybe how I could give an opportunity to students.
We did this observational task. Basically sit and listen, observe their immediate social surroundings. And most of them chose to draw, which inspired draw each other. From that, we jumped to the idea of doing an interview process.
It began with us walking through Peckham, going into various shops. We conducted interviews. And the people that were happy to go along with that, we asked them to take their photo and then worked into the photo with our own styles to create a variety of prints and pictures.
This is the first time I actually did anything collaborative outside of school.
Being in Peckham, I feel like it's the people that really define the space here. Thinking about as an artist, how do you treat people? How do you become part of that community?
We encourage whatever it is that the student wants to explore in their work. Through our teaching, we're looking at gender equality, racial justice, climate change. It is so diverse. The painting styles and what people bring from different parts of the world combine.
Here in London, people have access to all of these encyclopaedic museums. And I feel like a lot of people take that for granted. But in other countries, maybe you can't. So for me, it was really important to try and make this artwork, make all of these aspects of culture, and just making them more accessible.
Camberwell is a good space for you to do that because it does allow you to work in all these different mediums. I found that collaborating was for me the best way of producing a piece of work. Like, I've created a scroll in collaboration with a Japanese artist. This is the way that 19th century artists practised. And it's just bringing it to a contemporary way of thinking.
We have a very hands-on approach. We call it thinking through making. You really feel part of something when you're working in the studio.
People make things all the time and make amazing outputs, not only with digital technologies, with ceramics, and with 3D printing, with printmaking. You start to challenge what a discipline means.
We do like to question each other to widen the way we make our work, but to also grow as people.
Camberwell has opened up a lot of doors for me where I'm able to see myself in the art world. That I'm able to meet people like myself and feel like there's a future for me.
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