From 30th June to 3rd July, students from the Royal College of Art (RCA) present RCA2023, a series of exhibitions and events across the College’s Battersea and Kensington campuses and online as a digital discovery platform – RCA2023.
The RCA was named the world’s leading university of art and design in the QS World Rankings 2023 for the ninth consecutive year (QS World Subject Rankings 2015-2023).
Bringing together work from across the College’s four schools – Architecture, Arts & Humanities, Communication and Design as well as the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre – RCA2023 Exhibitions and Events will feature an international student cohort of emerging artists, designers, architects and creatives ahead of their graduation. MA students who started their courses in September 2022 will exhibit at the College’s campuses in Battersea and Kensington, offering visitors an insight into their work and creativity, through exhibitions, events, interactive activities and discussions with artists, designers and creative practitioners.
RCA2023 at Battersea and Kensington will encompass conversations, presentations, performances and unique experiences as RCA students and teaching staff come together to inspire, educate and inform.
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Events
Events available to browse on the RCA2023 digital discovery platform include:
● Join + Stitch, a stitch workshop exploring various hand-led joining methods, developed by Zoë Daley (MA Textiles) from her practical research into modular clothing construction.
● Creative AI? with Natasha Burman (MA Fashion) will explore and question the role of AI in the creative process in a panel discussion set around a dining table designed by Natasha’s own DADA inspired AI program.
● [fragment of babel], a workshop presented by MA Information Experience Design in which participants will translate their handiwork from written formats into visually captivating 2D and 3D forms, harnessing the potential of AI.
● ‘Print Out’ (MA Print) a student-led event which showcases the achievements of this year’s graduating cohorts, while engaging with invited guests on a topic of importance.
● From 30 June until 3 July, the MA Textiles and MA Fashion programmes will be running a series of drop-in sessions, performances, talks and workshops. On 3 July, between 3pm and 6pm, students on the MA Fashion programme will present F A S H I O N +, a series of short films giving an introduction to their design languages, processes and practices sharing who they are and everything that encapsulates what fashion means to them; inclusive of identity, community and cultural analysis.
Overall, the exhibitions and events propose design solutions and artistic responses to problems affecting society and the planet today, with five themes emerging that tie work together: Timelessness, Togetherness, Consciousness, Thinginess, and Interactiveness.
Timelessness is a prevalent theme throughout RCA2023 with students considering the past, present and future as well as the passing of time. In Wish You Were Here, Ken Nwadiogbu (MA Painting) draws from personal experience to explore the ephemerality of memory, using a palette that resembles thermal imagers, making the subjects pulsate with energy. Juliet Ferguson-Rose (MA Ceramics & Glass) uses the language of clay and hidden layers to reveal the human need to create, preserve and remember, while Parade of Pause, a group project by students in MA Curating Contemporary Art, is a parade intertwining field recordings and live improvisations with objects, born out of the aim to homogenise rhythm to a collectively shared slow pace – deliberately contrasting with the rapid speed of consumer culture and the pace that engulfs London as a city.
In A NEW NARRATIVE Shanice Palmer (MA Fashion) utilises the power of storytelling and its potential to shape the future of the black experience, particularly concerning notions of luxury, wealth and identity.
