The way an Art & Design
Foundation works is during the first term you do what’s known as the ‘pathway’
stage, which consists of work that covers four specific areas of art: 3D, fine
art, graphic design and fashion and textiles. In the second term, based on the
work you produce in the first term and feedback from tutors, you select one of
these areas to study. Your work develops over the next term through a series of
set projects and group crits with tutors and other students in your group. All
this experience you gain from your work (research methods, analysis of
successful work, improvements, etc) is then concentrated into the Final Major
Project, or FMP. It can be based on anything and you have six weeks to
research, design, develop and produce a final piece of work. It can be a single
piece, or a series of final outcomes.
I specialised in fashion and
textiles, as I’m useless at drawing, not brilliant with Photoshop and I don’t
get on well with the machines in the 3D workshop. But I am pretty nifty with a
sewing machine. Nobody in my group knew I had experience working part time in a
tailors and that I own six (yes, really) sewing machines, apart from the people
who had been at my previous school. So when I was asked to do some fashion
illustrations for the first project we did, I felt really conscious about the
quality of my drawings. But when I was (FINALLY) let loose with some fabric and
a sewing machine a couple of weeks later, I ran up a prototype of a jacket
within a couple of hours and had other fashion people from my group coming up
to me and saying “I can’t do that.” I was secretly thinking “yes!” Ok so I
couldn’t draw well (still can’t really) BUT I could sew and that gave me a confidence
boost when I found out a lot of people couldn’t. The next few weeks I spent fixing sewing machines for other students and completing projects, making garments where I could. An aspect that I did find a bit annoying was that (bearing in mind we were fashion students) we weren’t actually asked to make any finished garments, only prototypes from calico or paper patterns. When I asked why, the response was that this was a foundation course and it was the ideas you were graded on, not the finished product. I actually found this out after I’d completed my one of my final pieces- a jacket which I’d lined and finished how I’d been taught to finish a jacket in the tailors. I was NOT happy. Especially when I was told that I could’ve “stapled the seams together” rather than sewn them, and I still would get the same grade. I see this as a fault with the course, as fashion students are then sent off to university with next to no prior experience of garment making.
Part two of the FMP post is about how I tackled my own FMP and the first mini topic.