OCA Fine Art- Spring assessment happiness!

Well done to all the students who went through the Spring 2026 assessment event. It’s a great chance to reflect on your work and realise that actually, much work has been generated. You can often forget what you did on that very first daunting project or assignment so when you dig it back up again, you can kindly say to yourself ‘I did it’ and celebrate. The more you go through assessment, the more in tune you become of your own progress, discernment and judgement of what is good or bad work for you. 

Whichever stage you are at, an assessment event gives you impetus and determination to pursue onto the next unit. Through reflection, you realise what has annoyed you, what you turned your back on and what challenges you have had to face. But ultimately in retrospect, you can turn that love/hate relationship into a fruitful one. 

You go through emotions with your practice but you learn to be in a relationship with your work. Leaving a unit or stage and moving onto the next is not breaking up with it but maturing and moving on with it. The bonus is, you carry on with the wisdom you have learnt and the dos and don’ts. 

Here are three students who have a working relationship  with their current practice – 

At Stage 1, in the BA Fine Art 1.3 Materials & Making unit, Mhairi Lawson finds a symbiotic relationship between art and anatomy. Her work explores connections between different species and the ‘extreme contrast between the loss of these animals’. How have species evolved over time through anatomical development and how can this depict ancestral histories? 

Judith Nowotarska explores her local urban landscape in the Fine Art Studio Practice unit at Stage 2. Our environment can be chaotic, the design of the cityscape can be confusing and the materiality of monstrous buildings can be imposing. But Judith takes time to have a minute and simplify this chaos. By pushing the picture plane, she breaks down the complexity of the lived in world by not being irritated by it but co-existing with it. 

Viv King, having just finished the Fine Art 3.1 ‘Practice and Research’ unit, blatantly declares that she has a love/hate relationship with water, in particular, her local river. Her love for the water is open water swimming. “Seeing it as a source of both beauty and a threat, and also capable of causing destruction and loss”. Viv lives in a flood 3 zone where the floods of the local river have caused disaster, distress and danger. But simultaneously, there is a love of this water, its source and its function. Her collaboration with the water and the river is seen as a healthy tension where both are dependent and independent from each other. 

Trust in your relationship with your subjects, lines of enquiry and themes. It may not seem the most positive at the time but a relationship is still a form of connection, growth and evolution of your practice. As Antonia Showering says “paint that pain” (1)

Reference (1)  A note to the Author, Katy Hessel, ‘How to Live an Artful Life’, 2024.