BA (Hons) Art & Design Advanced Studio Practise Written Summative Evaluation
Project overview & intentions
As I stated in my specialist project proposal and summative evaluation, I was resolved to talk more about AI via my work this year. However, my deep dives into this subject during my first project and my written report illuminated the fact that AI reinforces the social threats already faced by the most vulnerable among us, and the current trend indicates that instead of reform, there will likely be a toxic doubling down on the historic patterns visible in colonialism and industrialisation. If we are to do better, then we all must participate in a moral revolution that steers us away from these colonial, patriarchal and ecocidal paradigms. Art has its place in protest and as a transgressive artist I am often called to use the very thing I am challenging in my work, so to hold up a stark mirror. So I am not committing to a root and branch exclusion of AI in my practice. But I did not include it at all in my advanced studio practice project for the aforementioned reasons.
For this project I wanted to expand on my new practice of rug making, scaling up in size and developing the complexity of my design. This was to be my main piece and I felt a strong compulsion to draw inspiration from folk costume and mythology. This was an attempt to meaning make in a world that feels like it's spiralling out of control and increasingly post-parody. When nothing in the present makes sense, it is natural to return to the resonant wisdom, divinity and power of ancient archetypes.
Charles Freger Wilderman series, 2010 - present day.
I also wanted to return to 3D printing, scaling up one (or multiple) of my existing sculptures and possibly creating new ones too.
I wanted to create some form of subversive stitch piece as a subversion of the fortune cookie.
And I wanted to scale up my Who’s In Charge? bull screen-print.
It was an ambitious proposal. And one that I did not manage to meet fully due to a significant bereavement in early April. But the work that I did manage to complete by the marking deadline is strong and resolved, and I learnt a lot over these last few months of studio practice. In fact, I am ok with the fact that yet again my practice evolved and stepped away from my seed ideas. This feels like a part of my creative process; that my large pool of initial ideas shifts and condenses over time, taking on a life of their own. It feels a bit like a dog pulling on a lead. Am I that dog?
Development of ideas
I started by researching, casting my net wide to include folk costume, Japanese Playboy magazine covers, contemporary sculpture and painting; for more details please see my other blog posts.
This part of my creative process is so valuable and full of alchemy, excitement and possibility. It’s a stage that I relish and my studio space and head is always chock full of visual inspiration, songs and book references. I am really aware of the appeal that my animal human hybrid rug, I Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Weapons, has. I was commissioned by an art dealer to create another rug as I was installing this piece in a gallery last month. And when I went to collect the same rug from the same gallery, during their monthly community street food event, multiple people stopped me and expressed sadness that it was leaving the space.
I decided that my main rug piece would again be a chimera of sorts. True to form, I eventually decided to create a feminist narrative piece, a subverted dark humour version of the Roman mythology of the goddess Diana. A chimera that explores aspects of divine feminine and masculine.
I was refining this idea at the same time that I watched Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. And at the same time that a girl I care for deeply started her first bleed; an event that was described by her GP as Precocious Menstruation. The title of the piece evolved fluctuated between The Manosphere to Precocious Menstruation. I settled on the later.
In my PPF I wrote about how I experiment with many creative disciplines as a direct result of my works concept driven nature, which commands that I work intuitively across media to allow each idea to find its own voice. My constant return to pink makes more sense to me now. It actually crystallized when I was creating the aforementioned technical document and when I was curating my specialist studio practise pieces for assessment. In so much variation, that colour has served as a kind of identity anchor, weaving a clear line of commonality throughout the discourse my work encompasses. I was already aware of it as a conscious choice, bringing it into dialogue as a gender loaded colour, using it as a tool in my feminist narrative work. But now I realise it has this other role too. And so I committed to using it again in this project, but stretched the colour somewhat, using fluorescent and gloss versions of pink as well as my trad matt Baker Miller pink.
I decided to upscale my Guardian of Whimsy. Now titled THE GUARDIAN OF WHIMSY as a reference to its scale increase. I knew early on that I would have to print externally because access to the internal 3D printer at college was not possible. Luckily I had access to a bank of printers. I had to really stretch my skill base around CAD tech for this, because I had never sliced and or scaled up a piece so much before. But I got there in the end and learnt a lot along the way. I decided to scale my model up to be human sized so it encourages a sense of parity, connection and empathy with my audience.
Research & Content
I detailed this in my blog more thoroughly but I was inspired by several artists during this project including Rick Bartow, Freddie Yauner, Eric Giraudet, Levi Van Veluw, Rosa Rauscher, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Get Down Services, and Charles Freger.
Materials, Media & Experimentation
I used a wide range of media intuitively in both traditional and experimental ways throughout this project. This included 3D printing, rug making, textile and subversive stitch work as well as mixed media drawing.
Feedback & Independent Practice
I have a strong focus on reflective practise in general, but this year I have really tried to dial it up as I take the next step in my career as an artist post-graduation. I have used my sketchbook and my Blogspot to capture my reflections. Below are my reflections on my Blogspot for my LCB award success.
I received lots of independent feedback during and outside of our arranged studio practice reflection sessions. I have also received feedback from curators and buyers as I have been exhibiting and selling externally throughout the year. I found this all really valuable, I appreciated the opportunity to talk around my work and listen to others perspectives. As before, I feel like this is an essential part of the creative process and I am already reaping the benefits of being in a shared studio on Marshall Street, Sherwood.
Final Outcomes & Presentation
THE GUARDIAN OF WHIMSY, Bethan Hemus, 2026.
The faceted, low-poly style, reminiscent of a low-fi or retro digital design, breaks the rabbit-human hybrid figure into planes instead of smooth curves. That gives it a gemstone or obsidian look. Light bounces off each facet differently, so the piece changes as you walk around it. It feels heavy and monumental. Talismanic. It feels alive with light because of the choice to finish it with a gloss paint; and using deep purple instead of black gives it a real sense of depth and means that the light refracts even more. It also looks a bit fetishy. I am pleased with all these effects.
It is human-sized, sitting on a chair like a person, but with a rabbit head and a very basic face. The posture is passive, hands resting, feet dangling; a mixture of familiar and uncanny that creates tension. In this way it is like a Japanese Noh mask; we can project our emotions onto it because there is no facial expression, just body language. The glossy finish almost mirrors the viewer back to themselves, reinforcing this metaphorical process of reflection and seeing. It feels like this character is waiting, contemplative, alien, and lonely all at the same time.
My choice to seat it in an ordinary chair does a lot of work. Chairs are human spaces. The rabbit chimera isn’t on a pedestal, it is “sitting with us” and this domesticates the creature, making the weirdness hit a bit harder. If it stood on the floor, it’d feel more like a statue. On the chair it feels like a guest. A really shiny and slightly confusing one.
Someone once told me that good sculpture works from 10m away and 1m away and I feel like this hits that mark. Am pleased. Next step, making a load more. Maybe out of wax. Or ice.
Plant Your Own Garden Instead of Waiting for Someone to Bring You Flowers, Bethan Hemus, 2026.
These pieces work well as stand alone objects and as an installation because they combine object and text to challenge the viewers expectations. The bright pink, lip-like sculptural forms do look like fortune cookies cracked open. But their scale, material and colour make them strange and ominous. They are too big and too bright, full of paradox and tension: the familiar clashing with the alien, the softness of textile clashing with the hardness of sculpture.
The text I included offers both humour and audience participation. There is an intentional combination of daft humour and dark humour. Each "fortune" reads like a bad joke, bad advice and a warning all at once.
Never do anything halfway. Never do anything halfway (the latter being half cut off the edge of the paper)
This cookie is never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.
For rectal use only.
run.
Your pet is planning to eat you.
It is my hope that the very light pink embroidery thread I used to create the text forces the viewer to lean in to read them. Fortune cookies usually boldly proffer messages of luck, comfort or potted wisdom. I have tried to flip this expectation in my work this time. Instead of "You will meet a tall stranger", the viewer now receives a paranoid, disconcerting or absurd "misfortune". The neon pink of the shells (which is absurdly playful) jars with this text. It is this push-pull that I believe will keep people looking and generate a relationship between them and the work.
The neon cookie shell offers more visually than the actual fortunes do, and this is a metaphor for the potency of the cookie pre-breaking. When the cookie is whole, it holds all the possibilities of the multiverse. When we break it open and read the cookie, that wave is collapsed and only the singular fortune we read is available to us. A deeper level of meaning this work generates is therefore: when I have taken the possibility of my fortune cookies offering anything fortunate, what then does my audience fill that space with?
This is the notion behind the title of the piece: that it can be our privilege to strive for our own fortune rather than waiting for it to be delivered to us.
You Are One in a Million, Bethan Hemus, 2026.
This piece uses repetition to flip the meaning of a phrase. The words become weaponized through repetition. The phrase "You are one in a million" is meant to feel special and unique. But I have repeated it 5 times in identical font with identical spacing, in the same blue text on identical white strips. The white strips and blue text feel clinical, like labels or data, and this makes the compliment feel utterly impersonal, almost like a barcode; the fact that there are multiple strips creates a rhythm for this message, drumming it home. The message that’s supposed to mean “you are unique” ends up proving you are not. It is mass-produced uniqueness; a reference for the vacuous promise so often made by late-stage capitalism.
This work becomes meta during exhibition, as it will be in a public space read by multiple people at the same time, doubling down on the joke inherent in the piece.
The minimalism of this work makes the idea land well I think. I really tried to create something stripped back in this work and I feel like I have. The work focuses on a cliché, repeats it until it breaks, and this creates space for my audience to come to their own understanding.
The fabric strips tie this piece in with my fortune installation works, making it feel like a series. But where the pink lips are loud and absurd, this is quiet and uncomfortable. It's the same format but offers a totally different emotional hit. Like two sides of the same idea: the first explores the absurd warnings and the second the empty compliments that we get told every day through advertising.
Precocious Menstruation, Bethan Hemus, 2026.
N.B. To be completed this weekend. Below image shows current progress.
The material carpet works as a metaphor for repression because of what carpets literally do and because of what they symbolize culturally.
Carpets cover floors, they hide dirt, stains, cracks and the mess underneath. “Sweep it under the rug” is literally a phrase about hiding problems. This is how repression works; things get pushed down, covered up and made invisible so the surface looks clean/acceptable. Women’s anger, ambition, sexuality and pain often get flattened and hidden under something decorative and domestic.
A carpet sits heavy on whatever’s under it. It presses things down, keeps them from rising. You can’t see what’s underneath, but it’s still there, being compressed. That maps onto certain social/cultural pressures around rules and expectations (for example “be quiet/be nice") that prohibit authentic expression. The pressure doesn't have to be violent but it is constant; which is exactly how a lot of societal repression works.
Carpet has inherent domestic and feminine coding. Weaving, cleaning and maintaining textiles has been tied to women’s labor for centuries. So using carpet as the metaphor points back at that space.
People step on carpets every day without thinking, representing a scary aspect of repression: that it becomes normal and an accepted status quo. You don’t notice the weight after a while.
Carpets get worn down over time in the places people walk most; the places under most pressure show damage first.
These semiotics is why I am connecting with rug making and textiles in general as mediums. Because soft materials can hold hard ideas.
My design mixes cartoon absurdity with body horror, displayed in a traditional craft medium. 3 juxtaposed aspects that combined, feel uncomfortable and generate a kind of morbid curiosity. The repeating grid pattern in this rug is a visual code for how toxic cycles like the aforementioned repeat. And there is a dissonance between the chaotic lines of the weeping eye the pattern of the ordered grid that adds a further sense of conflict and unease.
My cartoon/ graphic style lets me talk about pain, the female body and identity without it feeling too heavy for my audience. Humor is after all the Trojan horse for uncomfortable subjects.
The red scribble at the creatures chest that looks like a wound, with its yellow pus like drips sat parallel to cartoon eyes that reference childhood playfulness; making the work funny and disgusting at the same time. That tension is what holds the audiences gaze.
Speaking of gaze, there are eyes everywhere in this piece, referencing surveillance, the male gaze and anxiety. But the piece is staring at my audience too, while they stare at it, creating an uncomfortable loop of tense scrutiny.
Some of the creatures body is the same colour as the background and this is a reference for the repression of women by patriarchy; a toxic system that often renders women invisible.
Over all I am really pleased with this piece. My tufting skill has come on no end since I made I Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Weapons and it's visible in this work.
I created a custom environment to create pieces like this which is fit for purpose and comfortable, And I already have rug commissions lined up post finishing my degree. So I feel in a good place with this aspect of my practice.
Reflection & Future Development
As before, my main reflection is that my ambition needs to be more realistically reflected in my timelines. If I am to experiment with new disciplines and make large scale work, I need to factor this into my anticipated timelines, especially when there are external deadlines involved.
I have at least solved one problem with regards to logistics and that is securing a studio in Sherwood. It is a new studio community, based in an old double glazing factory building in Sherwood. It’s multidisciplinary and has a good energy about it. I have access to wood working, metal working and a kiln there and I know a number of the tenants already through social connection. The name of the studio is yet to be decided but I am *insert studio name here* number 10. The whole space is still a work in progress but I am getting stuck into making my bit of it fit for my needs, and it feels good to have a creative home ready for when I fledge the educational nest. Indeed, I need it, because it is the only space large enough to accommodate my big scale and noisy rug making activity at the moment.
This brings me to discuss the reflections that I had on my own practise after reading of artist Jonathan Baldock’s recent struggles. The gallery he was attached to went bankrupt while in possession of a large volume of his work. His work is large in scale and volume by nature. As a result, he had to choose which pieces he could afford to buy back, with the rest being scrapped. He has spoken about his experience recently with candour, reflecting on how it will likely inform his practise moving forwards. This is something that I need to think on as a creative who is constantly scaling up their work. I currently have most of my large-scale work on show at various spaces across the Midlands. But it would be daft to not consider the logistics and cost of storing large-scale pieces if they are not at exhibition. Currently I am involved in exhibitions from now until December this year, meaning that my current and immediate future body of work has a home for the time being. But what then? It is prudent to consider this if I plan to continue to make large scale and installation work moving forwards.
A part of the LCB exhibition opportunity required me to create an install document for their technicians, a lengthy process, but one that generated a practical, professional and recyclable output. In fact, the curator at LCB said an artist had never given them a technical document like this before, but that it had been so useful for them that they have amended their exhibition application process to require this of artists applying moving forwards. The process of creating this document gave me a chance to reflect on my body of work as a whole. In doing so, I realised that I have a large volume of strong work that is cohesive and sits well together, despite the fact that it spans three years of studio practise and integrates different disciplines and themes. All the hard work throughout my degree has paid off in the end because now I have a strong portfolio of ready to show work that I can share with curators as I step out of my degree.
With regards to the work made during my advanced practice module, I am determined to continue tufting and will try to secure some funding to enable a large-scale project soon. Likewise with 3D printing. I think I would like to abstract both techniques more, pushing the materials and the way I use them even further. I will not have access to screenprinting equipment post graduation and this is something for me to problem solve soon by becoming a member at a local print studio.
