Professor Felicity Aylieff

Felicity Aylieffis Senior Tutor in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art and an artist of international standing, recognised for her research into largescale ceramics. She has more recently developed a collaborative relationship with factories in Jingdezhen, China, where she makes monumental pots.

She has work in numerous international private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and is represented by the Adrian Sassoon Gallery, London.

Professor Felicity Aylieff RCA

For the first time in its history, the RCA’s renowned graduate show has this year taken place online as a digital discovery platform –RCA2020. Like artists, creators, designers and curators around the world, the 2020 graduates of the Royal college of Art have adapted, innovated and reimagined.

The Ceramics & Glass show would normally have taken place in the department, housed in the Woo Building sited just across from Battersea Bridge, south of the RiverThames, in London. Opened in 2015, and designed by Howorth Tompkins in close collaboration with staff and students forthe specific needs of the programme, it celebrates a ‘state of the art’ kiln room and glaze laboratory, glass facilities and wonderful open plan studios.

In this dynamic learning environment, the students spend two years working in an intense relationship with raw materials and transformative processes. They are encouraged to take up opportunities to explore ideas within and beyond the traditions of art and design; to expand their imagination and find their professional voice. Significant to this year was the pilot of a student residency project in Jingdezhen, China, with two students collaborating with local artisans, engaging in projects that would have been difficult to undertake back in London. There was also the development of community projects, notably workshops with dementia groups, and new projects exploring material thinking, encouraging students to locate themselves in a more global context. All have been a source of motivation and a spur to creativity.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the events of mid-March 2020 and the Covid pandemic, presented what felt like insurmountable new challenges, as students needed to abandon unfired work on their benches, kilns were left un-emptied and furnaces to cool down. Over the past weeks both staff and students shared the process of experimental teaching and learning through the possibilities and pitfalls of technology. The physical expression of work had to be rapidly translated onto screen, and the ability to improvise became a life skill. Suddenly forced to stay at home, bedrooms, kitchens, gardens all became studios, and students, cut, glued, constructed, painted and stitched together their ideas, augmented by virtual realisations, videos and animations, as they strove to present their practices in new and unexpected ways.

Emerging themes this year explore the transformation of states, phenomena of substance, and the materiality of colour –references to geology and landscape sit alongside narratives that document contemporary world events or imagined undersea utopias, or propose ceramic masses in the gravity-free digital world.

Alongside the online platform, to bring everything together the programme delivered three Webinars that gave students the opportunity to elaborate on the ideas and thinking behind their work.