A little less than three years ago or much more than three years, let’s just say somewhere between two years nine months and twelve years six months, the students whose work is presented in these exhibitions and commended to you here arrived on our threshold because it was what they had always wanted to do, to study art and be artists in whatever form that takes, because artists rule, or break the rules and invent new ones, or are the new argonauts, or because they wanted to be art teachers, or wanted to be artists with an art teaching qualification to fall back on, or were wanting to pursue the things that made them feel better, or made the world better, or who wanted to return at last to a passion that the circumstances of life had steered them away from, or who had woken up one morning and realised with some surprise that they’d been thinking like an artist all their lives, or who had thought that studying art would be fun and easy, soon discovering that Art is often not fun or easy but learning to embrace its challenges, or who had enrolled in something else because they had thought, or were told, that the other thing would be better for them but then deciding they would rather be here after all, because this was really what they’d wanted all along, or because they’d enrolled in a course here and decided to stay, or had enrolled here first, then transferred to a different degree, but then came back here again because the other degree wasn’t quite what they wanted either and they would have liked to do the best bits of both but on balance here was more freeing than there, or because one day a penny dropped and they loved the sound it made, or because they fell head over heels with a material or a process or an idea and wanted to follow it all the way down the rabbit hole, or because all or some of the lecturers and tutors and studio instructors and technical officers, were friendly and supportive, or challenging, or cool, or knowledgeable, or funny, or strange, or strangely annoying, or just human enough to keep them here even when they had their doubts, so much so that now some of those students want to go on to further study, or volunteer or take up a position or residency with a local art institution or organisation or business or studio or gallery, or are ready to take the plunge into the life of an artist, or art teacher or art worker, setting up a studio, making work, making connections, applying for grants and commissions, and to keep on learning because learning never stops, while others for now are just looking forward to a break, but not before joining with all the others described here, all or any of whom could be them, to celebrate their achievements and fix their eyes on the future beyond, which is now in much safer hands than before.

Stephen Atkinson,
Program Director,
Bachelor of Contemporary Art