There are a few people having issues as well as myself with the Friday module and the way it is being run. As the University has changed the course since we began, there are some people who joined onto a specialist course and are being force to use other materials they aren’t happy with. I am one of the students who specialised in glass and is not happy being pushed into ceramics for our next four-week rotation in a different area. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against ceramics; I just am not happy about forcing the use of ceramics within a project I am doing producing a table lamp. I am using glass as the lamp shade and metal (brass) as the base in silhouette shapes and so there is no need for ceramics. I went back to my studio space at lunchtime and was talking to Matt Bate who is a glass student who is in the third year and whom I studied with in my first year. He suggested that if I had to use ceramics, I could get around it by creating a ceramic slip cast light bulb. For display and marking purposes this could work and so I have already spoken to Mark Bath the plaster technician about how to do this and have acquired two different kinds of light bulb to make moulds from in order to get this underway. The sooner I finish it the more time I can spend on finishing the shades using cold processing techniques to add surface decoration.
I have also had discussions with the admin team in the school office about the module and they are going to have a meeting on Monday about how they are marking the module and whether students need to use three different materials to achieve marks in the module. I hope it gets sorted out quickly for everyone’s sake.