Foundation Art and Design
FFACTRI
This year’s Foundation students have worked from various perspectives and broad specialist areas such as Fine Art, Textiles, 3D and Visual Communication to produce work that relates to the title Ffactri.
A Ffactri in its purest sense is a building (or buildings) with facilities for manufacturing. The meaning of Ffactri in the very simplest of terms is ‘to make’. When considering Ffactri there are a number of potential interpretations that can be considered that extend the idea beyond the limitations of its’ dictionary definition. By exploring these nuances, our students have uncovered infinite creative opportunities.
The Foundation team would like to take this opportunity to wish all our students the best of luck on their new adventures.
Class of '25
Our Work
My work highlights the impact of altered perceptions, enthusing viewers to examine their own perceptions and consequential judgements on everyday situations.
The word perspective can mean a multitude of things. From the viewpoint of a photographer, perspective can be the visual illusion of three dimensions or the viewer’s perception of space and distance. A psychologist’s perception may be of perceiving a situation or understanding an idea from an alternative point of view.
This piece, entitled ’Really See’ strives to illustrate the concept of perception and how alternative viewpoints can be sought. Our minds instinctively process and categorise information, which is a cognitive reflex more commonly known as judgment. Good health to you.
Life is a blank canvas – choose the colours you love to paint your dreams!
Life is flow - connection - vitality. Certain things nourish our inner light; others deplete us. Disconnected from our instincts and our bodies, we spend too much time in our heads worrying about money and success, often neglecting what we truly long for. Like pebbles in a stream, our actions send invisible ripples out into the world. We can’t see them, but their impact is real.
Music, mindful movement, and art connect, using colour to trace the embodiment of joy or emotion in the present moment.
My work is a narrative piece with a focus on humanity and overworking, represented by black ink drawn with a dip pen. Human imperfection is represented through ink spots and blotches, as well as giving depth to the illustrations. Other themes include the replacement of humanity by machines, represented through cleaner, more mechanical drawings made with brush and fine liner pens. These are drawn with a ruler to reflect the precision of machines; they may look perfect, but they lack depth. This creates a quiet contrast between the styles.
The work also explores the guilt of inaction, sitting just under the surface of the story.
This work originated with a 3D scan of a mundane object - a shoe - not chosen for meaning, but dismantled through process and experimentation. The idea of journeys emerged later, as a byproduct of working with the form. Material exploration led to new structures, in both two and three dimensions. The shoe no longer exists - it has been replaced by a new form: a container for movement, memory, and thought.
The work reflects my experience of time-space synaesthesia, a condition where time is perceived spatially - for example, days or months may appear as shapes or paths. The work moves between inside and outside, past and present, physical and virtual. The piece could be relevant today, maybe not tomorrow, but possibly in the future.
I produce sound; ranging from soundscapes designed to create immersive experiences to more tuneful melodic pieces. My work explores how sound can affect us emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.
This sound piece aims to recreate the feeling of being in the womb; a space of warmth, rhythm, and protection. Distorted voices and manipulated real-world sounds - like the ocean - introduce a distant sense of the outside world, heard from within. The result is an artificial womb space, shaped by sound, memory, and feeling. The work reflects on the transition from complete safety to the unknown, and the emotional weight of that first rupture.
I believe that capitalism and consumer-culture have produced a society that is now detached from any authentic way of living. Society has become a spectacle of misplaced values, devoid of real human meaning. What does this breed within us at an individual level?
Amongst this ridiculousness, we find pockets of purity and authentic joy that are evoked from within rather than from outside. We must recognise what this means for each one of us, in order to live an authentic life.
By using collage inspired by the DIY-style of punk ‘zine culture, and the use of détournement inspired by the Situationists, I have recontextualised found material by overlaying it with my own personal vignettes filmed over the last 5 years.
My work explores the impact of social conditioning on both men and women. Through themes like mental health and dating expectations, I try to highlight shared issues of men and women while empowering viewers to challenge expectations, personal biases and the reactions of ourselves and others.
This piece aims to address self-expression and identity, opening dialogues which question where the boundaries of authenticity and social expectations merge.
My work reflects the unintentional but gradual erosion of my original cultural identity. Born in the Philippines and having lived in both China and Wales, I have been shaped by multiple influences, making my sense of origin harder to define. I use images and motifs drawn from personal experience - like the lotus flower and traditional Chinese cloth - distorting them into pixelated abstractions.
This series mirrors the anonymity of a factory line - each print is nearly identical yet slightly altered. Like fading ink or shifting memory, it reflects how identity quietly transforms through repetition and routine.
As a population, we share a disconnect from nature, being trapped in busy schedules and work. In order to survive, we spend our lifes working, with the workplace itself acting as a barrier, restricting our time amongst nature. I kept thinking about how unnatural it feels to spend hours inside cold, lifeless buildings, like some factories. In my design, the factory appears plain and stripped back to reflect a sense of emotional flatness. The inner space imagines where workers might long to be - somewhere softer, more free, offering a more ‘magical’ contrast to the reality many people face in industrial settings.
The conceptual themes explored in this work are psychogeography and memory. Each block is a cast of the negative space inside a room - each room tied to a memory of a place I’ve spent time in. What is usually an empty, traversable space is made solid in plaster, allowing no light through. This solidity reflects the physical presence of the place itself.
The latex layer represents our experience of the place. While plaster holds the structure, latex holds the memory, reflecting how we shape spaces and how they shape us in return. Its fluid quality mirrors the shifting, unstable nature of memory and lived experience.
I explore the aspects of our lives that reflect on, and impact on, our inner self. For me, it is hearing disturbance that mashes up what I think I hear. I have lost silence. Differences are obliterated and covered in a custard of manufactured sound. My work examines the impact of these things which muffle, change and obscure our perception and experience of the present and of being present. This new reality defines things differently.
As an extension, my work also delves into catastrophic sight loss and visual disturbance. I do this by creating my version of others’ experiences. I set out things which interfere with our here and now, and question whether these things add or take away from our lives.
Sorry, what did you say?
Exploring research and rights surrounding uteruses and the way men have traditionally had control over women’s bodies. Attempting to take away the sexualised version of reproductive organs and stereotypes surrounding motherhood. As a woman, I have always felt weighed down by, and tied to my uterus, like I am a birthgiver before I am a human. My art allows me to express how I feel inwardly in relation to my reproductive organs and my personal frustrations with reproductive rights, not only in the past but in this day and age, across the world.
I’ve always been fascinated by how cars are designed and built. To me, they represent movement and originality, which inspired me to explore them in more depth. For this project, I combined digital images with sound with each part of the project connecting back to my interest in cars—not just as machines, but as creative forms with their own character.
My work explores the emotional and physical toll of labour, particularly in the service industry. Using multimedia, I began by saving my order pads from the restaurant where I work, recording passing thoughts and sketches between tasks. These moments, usually buried under the pressure of constant service, were later transferred through drawing onto boards layered with the original orders themselves.
Rooted in the exhaustion that builds unnoticed over time, the work invites viewers to glimpse the often-unseen emotional landscape behind everyday service, exploring the tension between working for money and working as an artist. With a touch of humour, I highlight the private, unfiltered thoughts that are usually set aside in the rush to meet expectations.
This work represents my first time working with puppets and clay. I usually work in two-dimensions in my sketchbook. I wanted to explore movement and was inspired by the biology of people and animals. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) helped shape my puppets, while the set took influence from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010). I began with a simple fox sketch and moved on to model my own pets. Starting with basic clay ceramics, I developed their faces, movement, clothes, and most importantly their unique characters.
This piece explores how women’s bodies are treated like factory products; created, shaped, used and discarded. Seven white garments represent key stages in a woman’s life, from birth to old age. As they progress, each piece becomes more stained and worn, reflecting how society increasingly sexualises, controls and devalues the female body over time. The word factory becomes a metaphor for the systems that mass-produce expectations of womanhood. This piece questions how early and deeply this objectification begins and when, if ever, it ends.
I use filmmaking as a way to express my thoughts, feelings and perspectives. By experimenting with light, colour, composition and sound, I capture the thoughts that often race through my mind. To better understand these thoughts, I use symbols and signs representing different emotions or experiences, creating work others can identify with. Through film, I translate feeling into form, hoping to find answers to my own questions along the way.
In this piece, I use traditional filmmaking techniques to reflect on the YouTube trend of ‘Morning Routines’. By framing them through a critical lens, I explore their artificiality, highlighting the pressure to conform and the toll that can take on a person.
This animation reflects on the ways in which trauma affects our journey through life. It’s inspired by the way in which our conscious mind reacts to trauma and its disintegrating effects. It has little to do with memories – rather, how lived traumatic experiences disorder our reality after the fact. After such experiences, it’s up to our unconscious mind to restore itself to its natural order.
The animation was created using the ‘Source’ engine. This software is outdated, buggy and cumbersome. These limitations have been embraced to give a digital representation of the process of recovering from trauma.
This final project began with the endeavour to create a garment, with the main aim to explore colour, crochet, and cloth. I began by creating a simple patchwork pattern with these elements, connecting crochet with colour, which are fashioned from a variety of materials.
I created it this way to combine elements in an organic way, without a structured pattern. I have been influenced by the design work of Zoe Paul, Amy Twigger Holroyd and Lara Schnitger, bringing together various elements in my own dress.
In opposition to highly manufactured clothing, I am interested in hand-made process.
This work is inspired by fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s Clamshell Dress (2001). I was particularly interested in the construction and shape of this garment using clamshells as a precious and fragile material which also communicates strength and femininity.
I used this example as a starting point to then develop my own concept. I used paper since this was an accessible, neutral and easy material to cut, manipulate and repeat. I assembled cut-outs of elongated ovals (loosely based on the clam shape), then developed these into a design on the mannequin. In the future, I am interested in developing my pattern cutting skills, through sustainable fashion and textile methods.
Gender is a social construct, a factory template rooted in misogyny and stereotypes.
I have used the familiar comfort of plush toys, to recontextualise, provoke and explore this, twisting and distorting the concept of gender, to express fluidity and challenge stereotypes through textile sculpture.
The genderless fox is an expression of my own sense of never fitting into either box.
The work has been inspired by artists Le Fil and Leigh Bowery who challenge gender constructs. Additionally, the artist Mike Kelley’s Eviscerated Corpse (1984) alongside other stuffed animal artworks have been a major influence.
My work explores the abstraction and fragmentation of the human form to express feelings of discontent and existential dread one may feel when contemplating their role and value within whichever system or society they belong to. I use my own body as a base - the one variable that unequivocally represents my identity - to create layered, mixed-media pieces. Prints derived from my body provide an unbiased record, while drawings and mark-making overlaid reflect emotional responses to the instability of modern life. Omission of the face is deliberate; anonymity provides relatability and invites viewers to project their own feelings. This work is a raw expression of resentment toward the lack of power the individual bears in society, an anger that is universal yet suppressed.
This project has both a personal and environmental meaning. My family recently lost a close friend, and I decided to honour and remember him by creating his favourite bird, the Resplendent Quetzal, a bright and beautiful bird that mirrored his happiness and intelligence.
The second bird is dedicated to my Taid, whom we lost about 2 years ago, and whose spirit I see in the Red Kites flying around Wales. The shadows on the walls echo their lives and the freedom they both now have. Furthermore, I created the Red Kite using mostly plastic to represent the harm to animals due to plastic pollution.
This portrait uses CMYK (an analogue print process allowing for cheaper, larger prints) by sending an image through a digital filter before returning it to analogue by hand-painting each circle. The subject in the painting wears a ‘Creeper’ mask: a character from the game Minecraft. Just as the ‘Creeper’ mask brings a digital character into the physical world, the hand-painted process brings a digital image into physical form. While the digital world allows for people to connect and interact through gaming, it also creates a disconnect between the user and the physical world. This work explores the tension between connection and disconnection, physical and digital, reflecting on how we navigate relationships in an increasingly screen-based world.
This project explores the concept of a factory, not as a physical site, but as a metaphysical construct within our minds.
The work explores the brain as psychological machine where the mass production of thoughts drives human experience.
Black & white imagery strips away distraction, reducing the world to construct and form. It highlights the silent operations of internalised systems - capitalism, productivity, routine - that shape our thoughts and behaviours.
“Factory†is not just a metaphor for the mind, it is a reflection on the psychological consequences of living in a culture that measures worth with output.
Throughout Foundation, I’ve explored my love of ceramics and used this passion in my final piece. My work blends abstract, surrealist painting with vibrant ceramics, connecting environmental research with creative expression. This piece focuses on marine life - particularly small organisms like barnacles - and explores how we can create art sustainably. I’m inspired by the ocean’s textures and rhythms, and by natural dyes from the world around us. My aim is to express both the urgency and beauty of ecological change; to deepen my sustainable art practice by using low-impact materials and exploring how organic resources can be adapted to reduce environmental harm.
Exhibition Gallery
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
Foundation Art and Design Exhibition.
