EDUCATION &
training
My degree in psychology at Loughborough was rapidly halted by visiting a friend in the art department. Instantly when I stepped foot in that studio space & smelt the air & energy I realised I’d made a massive wrong choice of direction. That combined with a serious health scare which made me question time & what I would do was enough to ignite a giant U-turn to follow my heart, talent & passion. No matter the fate.
The health scare ended up all okay (incase you were wondering) but I wasn’t able to study art at Loughborough due to needing a foundation year first. This received no funding so it was a tough return back to home for me.
I did the foundation year, absorbing what I could but primarily self teaching myself every possible sector of art & way of creating visuals I could grab my paint covered hands upon. It was the turn of the century & a beautiful time where the digital technology was exploding into general use. Especially the arts & the creative scene. And here I was, bored of partying and super hungry to learn everything about visuals, the tools, the tech and the business of being an artist.
So I played with and consumed it all. Digital photography & videography, web coding and sites, graphics & any possible manipulation, traditional techniques, fine art, sculpture. Onto building 3d programming. It was an amazing time for creatives. This was all super new and felt like my hand saw and chisel had been upgraded to a chain saw and power tools.
Plus it was the main explosion of the internet into everyone’s lives. We were now starting to easily share visuals and information around the world. All by colour pixels on a screen. Social media hadn’t even been born yet and mobile phones were few and far between.
Seems not long ago, but I feel so lucky to have been the age I was, at a point in my career during the birth of the digital and technological revolution that we’re now firmly in.
But after my foundation year the educational system needed me to choose just one subject within art to study for 3 years for my degree. This made no sense to me and especially dropping 30k of debt into it.
I searched for a multimedia course, but it was a time period where it hadn’t come about yet. And to me, I loved using a mixture of tools to generate fine art. I didn’t see any logical career and business sense to remove these. To narrow down my tool usage and knowledge that I felt I would need for my future career.
So while I was waiting for a multimedia course to emerge I moved back down to the outskirts of London to seek work in a creative industry while I waited.
And the rest they say is history.