From precarity to clarity: Reimagining the student
I am a Fine Art student. I am not an English and History student – no matter what my degree says, I am not.
I had always imagined I would do something creative. In primary school, I wanted to do illustration, secondary school, fashion design, sixth form, fine art. My grades, however, threw these aspirations into doubt. On paper or those shiny certificates, I was not destined to pursue a creative subject.
Meanwhile, the numbers beside ‘English Literature’ and ‘History’ bore a hole through my mind, whispering ‘What about these subjects? Forget art. The Humanities, they’re the way forward.’ Everything I thought I knew was put into jeopardy.
Art was this exciting but dangerous prospect. It was a risk. English and History, on the other hand, were sensible, respectable – responsible. The fantasy of security seduced me. I applied for and was accepted into an English and History degree. I supplemented art for English and History.
My first term, indeed my second, at the University of Exeter in Penryn was steeped in resentment – for myself, my subjects, that very reality. I would often find myself drifting around the Falmouth Campus, longing for what could have been, gazing into the art departments, envious. Lost.
I spent the best part of six or seven months uncertain of my academic future. English and History saddened me, art brought me happiness. But was happiness enough? What would come after an art degree? At least English and History brought with them career opportunities. And am I even good enough to do art at degree level? Exeter has already accepted me. Will I be intellectually stimulated doing an art degree? I would need a portfolio for art and what if they don’t accept me? Then what? To drop out, or not to drop out. And on and on and on…
if I have learnt anything in my first year at university, it is that ideas, ideologies, philosophies – students, transcend labels
It did not just suddenly happen. I didn’t wake up one morning and BAM, I loved my degree. No, it was a slow, meandering process, a thaw. One often associates grief with the death of a loved one, but I had to grieve a future I had imagined for myself. I had to grieve a life that could never be. Coming to terms with my decisions and taking responsibility for the present was the catharsis I needed, desperately. Previously, I had felt like a victim of some external force whom things happened to, I did not make them happen per se. My agency was born out of my self-imposed passivity.
One day when the clouds began to clear and the blossom started to bloom, I visited a local art gallery that had just opened. Fresh and vibrant, paintings hung from the walls, oil, acrylic, charcoal: visceral yet utterly tactile. Seeing art or rather feeling it struck a chord in me. Art and creativity had not left me, rather I had left it. Too caught up with labels or subjects, I was under the impression that pursuing English and History at university meant that I had to give up art – substituting one for the other as if I couldn’t practice both. But it was not and had never been an ‘either or’ situation. There was no ultimatum; do English and History and you can never do Art again.
Looking back at those first few terms at the University of Exeter, my degree, my professors had never limited or restricted my learning to simply English and History. Rather I had been encouraged to explore elements of politics, philosophy, performance, architecture, theology, even science(!) and especially art. No one had limited me, except myself. My degree title may not say ‘Theology’ but that didn’t stop me from exploring the mysticism of St Augustine for a History essay exploring the political philosophy of Individualism. But if I have learnt anything in my first year at university, it is that ideas, ideologies, philosophies and students transcend labels.
I am not an English and History, nor am I a Fine Art student. I am simply a student. Or as the Roman playwright famously proclaimed, ‘I am a human, I consider nothing human alien to me.’
Image courtesy of Elizabeth Adrados