With Show One: Art open and in full swing, we talk to exhibiting art students about their work and the inspirations behind it.
For Show One, Simona Sharafudinov, MA Photography, presents Father, a sculpture and durational performance. Born in Lithuania and adopted by the UK at an early age, Sharafudinov builds her practice around an exiled identity site where social obsessions and idealised systems of value are questioned. Combining performance, sculpture, video, painting and drawing into one process of image-making, she creates mythical spaces inviting viewers to consider the nature of subjectivity.
Here, Sharafudinov shares five things that inspire her practice:
- The music of ANOHNI (formerly working as Antony & The Johnsons)
Pure energy, ANOHNI has been inspired me for over a decade showing me how to transform feelings of rage, hopelessness, and despair into work of art. Pop Baroque, I want my works to make those that encounter them feel as this music sounds.
- Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison works
Like a homeless and displaced body, I returned to these works time and again. They still move me as deeply as the first time I encountered them in 1999. The tension between infinite digital space and the finite physical body is post-gender. In the postmodern space hommes/men are as affected as femmes/women were in the domestic space in the 1970s.
- Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utskin (Soviet “paper architects”)
Beautiful, haunting and poignant, the work of ‘paper architects’ who designed imaginary and mythical cities and structures in 1970s incorporate feelings of past and future and evoke feelings of alienation, overcrowding, the absurdity of towers and all seeming eyes.
- And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger
Fusing the personal and political to create a sensorial experience and a mirror to a human experience of displacement in the ever changing time and space. This book helped me give form to my own personal and political feelings and made me understand the meaning of home and significance of photography. A home where the vertical and the horizontal lines meet.
- The Monolith (Space Odyssey)/Trump Gold Tower
The Future is Here… When life imitates art and art imitates life.
Degree Show One: Art is on show to the public at Central Saint Martins, 24-28 May with Degree Show Two: Design following 20-24 June.
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