This article was first published in the UEA student newspaper, Concrete.
The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts has launched a 3-month programme inviting creative responses to the UEA campus and community. This project, ‘Campus’, is being run in collaboration with 3 local artists: Hannelore Smith, James Metsoja, and Ali Hewson. Each artist provides a series of prompts, accessible through project packs on the Sainsbury Centre website, to encourage creative engagement with the UEA campus, community and art centre.
Drawing soundscapes, creating dialogue with objects, and mindful making with clay, the project offers a route through the campus that may be new and unfamiliar to even the most hardened veterans of the concrete landscape. In doing so, long-held beliefs about what the campus is and isn’t may begin to shift.
For me, the project offered a chance to refamiliarize myself with university site – having, like most of us, spent the majority of the time since returning to university hauled up in my room. Walking around campus, I found myself exploring areas that, in my three years of being a student at UEA, I had never even noticed. Standing by the lake, I was stuck by the surprising amount of natural beauty that concrete campus contains. Or, walking around the Sainsbury Centre, I became entranced by a range of newfound artwork, from Edgar Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ – had this always been here? – to an intricately carved hornbill. These new sights and sounds unfolding in places that I thought I knew.
Through its simple and effective prompts, the ‘Campus’ project provides space for creative engagement and exploration. At a time when many students are withdrawn from campus, this project therefore offers students a simple and safe way to rekindle their relationship with the various spaces that the university has to offer – something that is needed now more than ever.
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