Fragmentation and Synthesis

About

Fragmentation and Synthesis is running from 8 October 2018 – 27 January 2018 in Portsmouth Guildhall.

This exhibition presents an overview of our BA3 Interior Architecture and Design students’ work and includes their creative processes, explorations and their final designs. It is a presentation of the variety of projects of various scales and exhibits the richness of the research, the making, the experimentation, the conceptual and the technical understanding our graduates reach throughout their studies.

As a community of learners and researchers, the students and tutors worked together in ways that required cooperation, collaboration, curiosity and decision making. As part of their design projects, students embarked on collective inquiries to investigate and interpret the urban context and the disparate fragments that define its vibrant identity.

We adopted playful approaches to learning, and used collage as a methodology for reading and interpreting a place, for designing space, and for representing ideas using two-dimensional and three-dimensional techniques. Collage was an important tool that encouraged creative responses and different ways to record discoveries and generate ideas. A second approach was to generate designs based on narratives and stories about the city – fact, fiction, historic, contemporary.

The results and our reflections on practice suggest that the methodologies enhanced the creativity and quality of students’ work but also had value as stand-alone creative processes. The methods also prepared the students for the curation and design of the end of year exhibition in May 2018, which presented the story of their collective endeavours, samples of which are presented in this display. This is a Synthesis of Fragments of their work, which presents last year’s journey, as they were preparing to enter the industry, full of skills and ideas.

The Fragmentation and Synthesis exhibition is part of an ongoing exhibition programme hosted by the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) at the University of Portsmouth in partnership with Portsmouth Cultural Trust at the Portsmouth Guildhall.