MA Fine Art Degree Show - University of Gloucestershire

Herdi Ali Kardi

The University of Gloucestershire’s MA Fine Art Degree Show is at Hardwick Centre for Art and Photography, St Paul’s Road, Cheltenham, 18 -22 September 2013.

Course leader Nat Goodden writes:

The exhibition will feature the work by the graduating artists, Herdi Ali Kardi and Alice Leeman, who both have a strong concern for the human condition and what it is to suffer.

The prints and large-scale drawings exhibited by Herdi Ali Kardi reflect his exposure since childhood to the horrors of war and, as a Kurd from Iraq, to the experience of genocide. He is a story-teller who does not focus on his own personal experiences as much as on those of his people. He does not spell it all out (which could diminish its power to affect), but draws you in to the desolation of a people and their culture under assault, as it has been for his whole life, and with roots reaching back to the early twentieth century and beyond. Despair and courage, resistance and determination, lurk just out of sight. The poetry is there before your eyes.

Alice Leeman’s paintings reflect something much more private. She draws on her experiences as a close observer of fragile states of mind, and in particular of those who are susceptible to chronic anxiety. Her work analogises something that is neither physical nor visible, and takes the language of painting itself – the skin of the canvas, the bones of the stretcher – as a metaphor for the mind and body. Her deconstruction and destabilisation of the elements of painting is about as far as could be from a dry intellectual exercise; it eloquently represents something that may be in us all, in the fragile chemistry that shapes who we are, and how we respond to the world outside. 

MA Fine Art is a practice-based course taken as one-year full-time or two-year part-time study. All forms of contemporary practice are supported, and backed up by a programme of critical, theoretical and professional studies.

Alice Leeman