The Graduation Ceremony

I was off work Monday and Tuesday with a chest infection and only returned mid-week to do dissertation tutorials. I wasn’t really well enough and ended up back in bed on Thursday, but came out again today for the graduation ceremony for last year’s students which was held in Leeds Town Hall.  Still not quite recovered, I arrived with a splitting headache, which would last all day and into the evening.

I’ve been attending end of year leaving ceremonies, or graduations for well over thirty years and it never ceases to amaze me how students change in such a short period of time. And yet in many ways they remain the same and I change, each year getting older, the students returning bathed in their eternal youth, frozen in their late teens and early twenties, whilst I outwardly age, inwardly remaining an eternal art student.

I had two groups of students I had taught graduating this year, from Digital Film Games and Animation and Fine Art. I probably knew the digital film students as well, if not more than the fine art students because they were a small cohort and I was brought in to solve a problem with their attitude over contextual studies. The fine art group is much bigger and I didn’t get to teach them that much in their final year, a few days doing crits and some sessions near the end as final shows loomed. Even so it was enough time for me to feel bonded to them in some way. Enough time to hopefully pass something on from that mound of accumulated knowledge of the business I’ve managed to glean over the years.

A dreamlike distancing takes place when the students don black Open University robes with their light blue and gold hoods and flat mortarboards. What is designed to ensure the passing out ritual is remembered and has significance also renders all the individuals into cyphers. Their strange flat-topped headgear named after its resemblance to a plasterer’s hawk, operating as a last tiny vestige of an apprentice’s passing out ceremony. A ceremony with perhaps a longer and more dignified history than academia, these students inheriting a tradition that for thousands of years was passed on from master to apprentice, a skill based craft ridden occupation, muddied by the Carracci Brothers with their dam academy. The students walk up onto the stage of the Town Hall, a hall decorated with swirls of imitation marble, a wonderful celebration of craft, labour and work, as they stride out to applause, their shoes speak of their time, their bodies and heads of history and as they shake hands and receive their certificate, somehow they also become strangers, people I no longer recognize. They are suddenly older, in the past few months have matured without me realizing it, now men and women, not the youngsters who arrived just over three years ago. 

I hope they do well, I hope their dreams are not crushed by reality. Some will perhaps make art and survive, some may even go into art education. If they do I hope it will be as good an experience as it has been for me. For all its ups and downs, for all the attempts to smother the profession under layers of administration and false learning goals, there is still a kernel of truth and solid links that go back through all the connections of artists who have taught artists who have taught art.