Heike has finished her degree! 


Well, it's taken three years of long, hard slog, but Heike has recently completed her degree in Child, Young Person and Family Studies (CYP) and Fine Art at St. Martin's College, Lancaster, and very happy she is about it too! I went over there last week to attend the grand opening of her final year degree exhibition, called 27º (twenty-seven degrees, geddit? Unfortunately, there were only 24 students exhibiting, but the thought was there!). It was a great night, and there was much celebration by all, both at the exhibition itself and afterwards in the student bar, not to mention relief that all the hard work is now over and that normal life can resume again (whatever that is). 

The exhibition itself was extremely impressive with a wide range of styles and techniques on display. Here is a picture of Heike standing in front of a couple of her larger pieces, which are constructed in the expressive style of children's art, using simple lines and bold colours to convey feelings, events and visual narratives that can be interpreted and understood once you understand the language of elements employed by the artist.



To the uninitiated eye, they may look like scribbles, but believe me, there's a lot more to it than that!

Also on display were a series of fourteen (out of an original twenty-one) smaller pieces representing a diary of several weeks of Heike's life. Although each picture is unique, the similarity between the compositional elements represents the monotony of getting up, studying, painting and then going to bed again every day, making each day almost indistinguishable from the last. The use of colour and lines over written elements, which form a backdrop to each of the pictures, is very striking and they work really well together as a sequence. Heike has already had some interest in selling some of these pieces (£85 each if you're interested!).

The exhibition runs until Saturday 18th June, after which Heike will be coming to York so that we can start looking for a place to live for the next couple of years while I'm finishing my degree. I can't believe she's at the end of her third year and I'm not even finished my first yet! Overall though, I think Heike has done brilliantly, and has already received very high marks for much of her written and visual work. This achievement is even more amazing when you consider that she is studying in a second language, which slows down the reading and writing process, even when you do have a willing and able native speaker on hand to help out with the occasional questions of wording and grammar (that's me, although my knowledge of English grammar, or any other kind for that matter, is sketchy at best).

Although the hard work is now over, Heike still has to wait until the end of the month to receive her results, before finally graduating on 12th July. At the moment she's just happy to have finished the course and is rediscovering the joys of free time and watching television (although finding the latter not too exciting, it has to be said). Plans for the future include looking for a job working with children and artists in the York area, and possibly becoming more involved with the Reggio Emilia approach to early years education, which is something she has become very interested in since writing her dissertation on the subject. However, her first priority is to relax and recover from what turned out to be a very hectic and intense nine months, not to mention the two years prior to that…

Whatever she ends up doing, I am sure I express the feelings of everyone who knows her when I say, with great love and admiration: WELL DONE HEIKE! 

Posted on Wednesday - June 15, 2005 at 12:08 PM            

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