Who We Are

Pedagogic Project

As you begin your degree at Kingston School of Art and continue on your creative journey, it is important that you continue to develop and grow confidence in your own voice as an illustrator animator. Your voice is unique to you and will relates to the subjects and themes you want to make work about, the people you wish to make work for, and the processes and visual languages that you’ll use to express yourself and communicate your ideas. These themes might come through your own unique backgrounds; cultural and social heritage, experienced and understood both as individuals but also as part of a broader collective society.

Throughout this year, you will work both independently and collaboratively as part of a cultural community. This project asks you to consider your identity from the perspective of both the individual and the collective. You will be introduced to working methods that will support the development of your ideas, values and voice to harness the collective energy of our studio community as a declaration of who we are.

Brief

Over the course of the next three weeks, you will be introduced to a range of collaborative methods for illustration animation and be asked to use these to investigate and visualise identities that relates to and are significant for you.

Through this project, you will collect and interrogate your individual interests, values and references as a method of research, before widening the scope to find a commonality between you and your group.  Each group will work together to expand on this common ground to develop a reproducible, collaborative zine and risograph poster that offers a visual snap-shot of who we are, our shared values and identity/ies at this point.

Our intention is to have an exhibition and zine fayre in the main entrance at Knights Park to declare our identity and share our work with the wider community at KSA as a statement of intent that communicates our values, interests and beliefs as a collective. 

‘Who Are We’ is a collaborative group project that uses a shared theme of commonality between each group as a starting point for research, experimentation and communication.

Laura Copsey is an experimental illustrator from East Anglia. Her way of working is interdisciplinary and collaborative, blurring with her background as a therapist and musician. Laura is interested in the grey area between what is real and imagined, between truth and lies – gaps which often shed light on what a particular story can reveal about the present. Laura uses objects, cameraless photography, moving image, collage and sound to explore traces of human endeavour from history, within heritage locations, traditional trades or museum collections. She also organises expeditions, most recently with Sail Britain on the theme of Islandness. Laura teaches level 4 on BA illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art.

Instagram: @laurachops
Website: www.lauracopseyart.com