Open College of the Arts MA Fine Art Graduate Exhibition includes both emerging and established contemporary artists.

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“I Swear I Saw This” testifies to a collective method of witnessing the world and our curiosity in looking. A curiosity that only grows as visual impressions are sensed, mapped and displayed - transported from out of the world of the see-er to a visualisation of the thing seen and re-made. The title, taken from anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflection on ethnography processes of sketching in fieldwork notebooks, references his thinking about embodied creativity. It considers the artist's position from which knowledge is made - the continual delight in the systems of investigation, recording and sense making that we draw on to create. 

 

A shared title is not there to suggest common emergent themes where there are none, it’s not there to conjure from thin air a fanciful common agenda. Rather to suggest that we as a body of people are connected through the cultivation of looking, by visual curiosity and of overlapping investigative methods.

 

Our impressions, sensations and image making reveal endlessly varied positions from which the world around us can be understood. In sketches, films, photographs, sculptures, collage, installation and paintings we are witnesses and participants in what we might call ‘the imaginative logic of discovery’.