Samuel J H Froggatt: A Semester in Review

For our mid-session review, we were instructed to write a short summary of our first semester.

As an artist it is good to be challenged, but that does not mean that being challenged is comfortable. This semester has certainly had its fair share of obstacles to overcome. I have not produced the volume of work that I had hoped to, though I have been anything but complacent on the cerebral front. The program of two-week projects has seen a myriad of thought processes not seen to fruition, which has been intensely frustrating, as I take huge enjoyment from the loving honing of an idea and then the execution an outcome. Despite this, when I reflect on the semester as a single project, that of formative development, I am satisfied with the outcome. The work I showed for the end of semester exhibition is a site-specific installation made up of five individual works entitled 14/15.

My foundation year in Falmouth was hugely instrumental in my creative development, but the work I created there was in service of an idea, as opposed to as a means of self-expression. I now realise that this had left me with a burden of unexpressed thoughts. It would be nice to just move forward, and that is what I had told myself to do throughout the year. However, such things become acid, and burn you out from within. It was these experiences repeating themselves here in Edinburgh, and being impossible to ignore, that proved the catalyst for my releasing both these feelings and those I had bottled up from last year. It is perhaps a testament to the persistence of these thoughts that they seemed to pervade every project set.

For the Phenomenology of a Room project I deconstructed my ‘ivory tower’ – both a spot of isolation and exhibitionism in the sculpture court and a frame of mind, in which my deliberate self-exclusion masquerades as intellectual superiority. The presentation we had to make for the Unmonumental project was for me a work in itself, I took the chance to express the ideas that I had not seen to fruition. This was my first tentative foray into performance, and was immensely enjoyable. For the Place and Position project I collaborated, for the first time, with a fellow student. We created a character, Yvette, and an accompanying body of work. It was through Yvette that I released some of the suppressed feelings from the past year. It is often easier to project your experiences onto a character than to place them in the context of your own life. Though seemingly disparate, all the work came together to create what felt like an honest reflection of my state of mind.