Jon Elsom finds 'raw, brooding, pre-apocalyptic work' at the UWE degree show

Can you teach creativity?

Can people achieve creativity by having it thrust upon them, or are they simply born creative?

Perhaps it’s actually a question of separating the notion of creativity from talent.

Every person comes into this world with their own individual talents born of their own genetic bent. When that screaming sperm hurtles, with an ironic lack of regard for life and limb, into that egg, two lots of talent combine and make one unique blend. The resulting human’s talents are inclined towards the arts to a greater or lesser extent, depending on those genes, and that bent.

But it takes creativity to ignite the talent.

And creativity is not an innate, God-given asset. Nor does it simply happen to you one day in a comic-book flash of lightning.

Creativity comes about through hard, gut-slogging work. From identifying a problem, immersing yourself in a subject, making endless connections between previously unconnected things. Throwing out 95% of your ideas. On a bad day, 100%. Until you’re left with that one idea, that one connection between two previously unconnected things, that one idea that knocks all the others into a cocked hat. The one that is brave, fresh and inspiring. That changes things, even if only just a little bit, from how they were before.

So while talent can’t be taught, creativity can. The motivation and discipline, the scrutiny and rigour, the bravery and sheer chutzpah that it takes to get to the killer idea. All these are things that can be learned. And practised. And improved.

Taught creativity won’t get everyone there. You have to have enough innate talent for the creativity to find it. How often do you hear people say of writing: “Everyone has a book in them”? In some cases, that’s exactly where it should stay.

But for plenty of other people, taught creativity will cut the bonds of mediocrity or adequacy and let their talent soar.

At the UWE Creative Industries Degree Show at Bower Ashton Campus last week, there was plenty of evidence of this.

Creative work was presented across 14 graduate and post-graduate creative courses, including Animation, Drawing and Applied Arts, Design, Photography, Film-making and Creative Media, Graphic Design and Illustration.

There were pearls that shone.

Charlotte Harman’s animated short ‘Neebles’ told the disarming tale of some felted creatures whose colours are stolen by a woolly grey cloud. Photography student Laura Leigh-Bessell’s heart-breaking book ‘This will do me’ starkly portrayed a real, long-divorced couple in their 80s living isolated, lonely lives in different parts of the south-west. Graphic Arts post-graduate Kate Blandford inveigled her dark way into our hearts with nostalgic framed embroidery which replaced homely aphorisms with ‘Party ‘til you Puke’ and ‘Raining Blood’. Graphic Design graduate Rebecca Penmore’s ‘Inheritance’ featured a book of ‘Curious Bequests and Unusual Last Requests’, a typographically splendid paean to real-death unlikely bequeathals.

These were pearls which, while shining, cast shadows.

Foreboding was a predominant theme across the entire show. This was work created in a world at odds with itself, a world trying to prioritise its meltdowns. This was raw, brooding, pre-apocalyptic work. Design from the doldrums. Art from the end-game.

It’s known that the best creativity often rises out of conflict. Now that it’s not just the individual’s inner conflict at work but a global malcontent that shifts and grinds like irritable tectonic plates, there’s evidently plenty of grist to the creative mill.

Global issues were taken head-on, as you would expect. Even the now clichéd image of a polar bear on an ice-berg was given new life with Becci Furness’s ‘Frozen Planet’, a triumph of painstaking model-making which saw a vast number of the stricken beasts on a sliver of ice. Also memorable was Kristian Fletcher’s sculptural installation of a wire structure, torch-lit to project on to a wall a haunting image of a colossal, skeletal steel structure, redolent of a building’s stripped remains in the aftermath of some unnamed catastrophe.

Across the displayed work from all 14 courses, this was a showcase groaning, almost audibly, with talent. The best of it was creativity delivered simply and viscerally, as with all important and memorable ideas.

Alli Parry’s study of hockey players was adept and apt. Close-ups of injuries were brought home with the photographic paper ripped around the perimeters of open wounds, giving the impression of framed flesh rent apart, exposing livid red matter.

Her work symbolized the wider offering at the show.

This was creativity not only taught, but taut.

The comfortable fabric of our everyday world had been split open in thousands of little places. And what was revealed underneath was a startling, discomforting layer of truth.

And doesn’t the best creativity always come from places like that?

Want to review your local degree show for us? Email cameron.clarke@thedrum.com.