People all over the country had the chance to hear from Chelsea students earlier this month, when they were interviewed by Mary Anne Hobbs on her BBC Radio 6 Music show, broadcast live from Chelsea’s neighbours Tate Britain on Saturday 1 December. The event was part of Art is Everywhere, the BBC’s annual celebration of creativity and this year marked the 2018 Turner Prize.
Rory Brown, a BA Design Communication student, Bunny Ladd, a BA Textile Design student and Chloe Swords, a graduate from BA Textiles, spoke in front of a live audience about the fantastic community at Chelsea and the benefits of collaborative working. They were guests on the show alongside a host of others from the art and design world, including David Crow, Head of Colleges for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon and 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid.
To coincide with this exciting broadcast, students from all three colleges saw their artwork projected on to the side of Tate Britain in a specially-created looped film that was later shown on social media and has been watched more than 16,000 times.
Students from courses including BA Textile Design, BA Graphic Design Communication and MA Interior and Spatial Design were also busy at the college during the broadcast, making work live in response to the themes of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.
Undergraduate and postgraduate Textile Design students worked for the duration of the show on individual pieces inspired by the idea of borders, and the form of cinematic film reels in a nod to the fact that all four of the prize nominees this year had made film and video works.
Speaking about this work on the radio, Chloe Swords explained that “we’ve been working with the themes of borders and barriers, looking at the ones you might find in the art world, at art school and even represented by the Turner Prize itself. We’re putting our pieces together to create a kind of barricade that plays with these ideas.”
, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL
At the end of the 3 hour programme which was on air from 7-10am, they connected the ‘frames’ together and carried the final piece out of the college in a procession, and presented it on the steps of Tate.
Asked how they found the motivation to get up so early to complete the piece of work in time for the end of the show, Chloe said: “It was a great opportunity to be involved when three big institutions – UAL, Tate and the BBC – get together, it’s worth getting up for!”
Listen to the Art is Everywhere special on BBC 6 Music
Find out more about studying at Chelsea by visiting our course pages