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MA Fine Art students explore place, memory and possibility

Friday, 11 September, 2026

For the artists graduating from the MA Fine Art programme, the Degree Show represents a culmination of a year's study for full-time students and two years for part-time students. It is a chance to bring together the questions, discoveries and experiences that have shaped their practices. From spending a month camping in a garden, to transforming a Wendy house into an immersive installation, or using a broom, a pistachio and a layer of dust to challenge perceptions of what a piece of artwork can be.

Across their work, graduates Jazz Potter, Vicky Hall, Jen Hamblin and Harry Wilkins demonstrate the breadth of contemporary fine art practice, while sharing a common desire to encourage audiences to look again: at their surroundings, their memories, the spaces they inhabit and the assumptions they bring with them.

Jazz Potter

For Jazz Potter, the MA Fine Art ‘Propagate’ Residency, led by Claire Loder, became an important influence on both her Degree Show work and a zine publication.

The residency encouraged Jazz to consider how artists connect with their surroundings and the role creative practitioners can play in wider society. Spending time at the Bath City Farm prompted her to think differently about how a place could become part of her practice.

“I think going back to the propagate book, I hadn't done a publication before, and then the residency was new, and it was at the farm, and I think one of the sessions was about how to use the farm as your studio.”

The experience encouraged her to investigate the site through an artist’s perspective.

“I remember going around the site and thinking, how do I connect to the farm? How do I go about investigating it?”

For Jazz, this process of paying attention to the world around her has become central to her practice.

“I think my work has kind of made me. It’s been me mirroring how I experienced the physical world.”

She describes the residency as an experience that opened her eyes to the things happening around her, demonstrating how seemingly simple acts of observation can become the starting point for creative enquiry.

Vicky Hall

For fellow MA Fine Art graduate Vicky Hall, the Propagate Residency similarly sparked an unexpected journey of discovery, this time much closer to home.

When Vicky was asked by Jude Rice - one of the Propagate facilitators - what she had growing in her front garden, she realised she didn’t know. Her response was to turn her own garden into a field site, camping beneath a tree in her back garden throughout July and documenting everything she encountered:

“I decided to go on a field trip to my own garden, and so I camped out under the tree in the back garden for the month of July, and I kept a diary of what was going on day and night.”

Vicky identified every specimen in her garden, collected rainwater and documented her observations, incorporating foraged clay slip from the garden into her Degree Show work.

At the heart of the project is an invitation to slow down and pay attention to the environments that are often overlooked:

“It’s about the art of noticing what’s on your doorstep.”

The residency also introduced Vicky to new people, ideas and possibilities within her practice.

“It has been the most amazing opportunity for me, and there’s just so much potential. There are so many things that you can do, so many different paths you can follow here and so I’ve just gone a bit into free fall really and just followed whatever I felt was right.”

Jen Hamblin

While Jazz and Vicky have looked outward to their environments, Jen Hamblin has explored the intimate territory of memory and relationships.

Jen’s Degree Show installation centres around a Wendy house illuminated by projections, creating an immersive environment that draws on childhood, memory and her relationship with her sister. Her practice moves across multiple disciplines, including clay, lantern-making and photography.

Rather than seeing these different media as separate, Jen considers the objects she creates as vessels — carrying memories, experiences and possibilities:

“My relationship with my sister is at the heart of the work. However, I was never interested in simply telling her story or my story. I wanted to create a framework through which audience could encounter their own memories, relationships, and emotional experiences.”

She continued:

“I became interested in the things that happened between the spaces, the space between the artist and viewer, the space between object and narrative, the space between parts and history, you know, how we identify ourselves.”

Harry Wilkins

For Harry Wilkins, questioning expectations is at the heart of his practice.

His Degree Show installation deliberately disrupts conventional ideas about what constitutes an artwork. A broom is held up by a metal pistachio, a folded piece of paper appears to support it against the wall, and a layer of dust sits by a window. The work plays with absurdity, expectation and the viewer’s response to the space around them.

Harry sees the space itself as a medium:

“The medium, instead of like a painting, is like the space, and the reaction to the space.”

Rather than dictating how an audience should interpret the work, he is interested in the questions it generates:

“I like that people ask different questions because of the space or because of the work in the space. And that the work allows people to think differently or like ask questions.”

The uncertainty is intentional. Harry embraces the possibility that an audience might initially be confused, disappointed or even unimpressed before reconsidering what they are looking at.

“I sort of welcome people being disappointed and then shocked and then surprised.”

It is an approach that reflects a wider understanding of the Degree Show itself: the work may appear unfinished, unconventional or unresolved, but that does not mean the thinking behind it is incomplete.

“It appears unfinished as a show, but it is. The ideas are finished.”

Harry’s practice has also been recognised beyond the University, with the artist winning the KARST residency in Plymouth.

To see all of the graduates final pieces for the MA Fine Art Degree Show, check out the .

Taken together, the work of Jazz, Vicky, Jen and Harry demonstrates the diverse ways in which MA Fine Art students can develop their practices. Their approaches range from close observation of the natural world to personal memory, experimental materials and playful challenges, to the expectations of an exhibition space.

Whether it is noticing what is growing in your garden, reconsidering a familiar childhood memory, questioning the role of an artist in society, or wondering why a broom is apparently being held up by a pistachio, their work asks audiences to pause and reconsider what they think they know.

For these graduates, the Degree Show isn’t just a presentation of finished artworks. It is an invitation into the questions that have shaped their practices — and an opportunity for audiences to form questions of their own.