Exhibition Catalogue

Future Reflections

Future Reflections is a student-led project organised by the first-year MPhil/PhD cohort at Chelsea College of Art & Design. This three-part program includes an exhibition, publication and a two-day conference that focus on the interplay between research and reflection at different stages in the art-making process.

The exhibition presents artworks discarded by Chelsea students. Failed experiments, no-longer-useful studies, projects too difficult to store etc, were collected in the Triangle Gallery to be reconfigured into new forms over the course of the conference.
The conference, also situated in the Triangle Gallery, invited researchers associated with Chelsea to share their work with students, colleagues and members of the general public. A variety of contributions were proposed; talks, workshops and performances - all relating to the themes of research and reflection.

For this publication, Chelsea students across levels were invited to submit proposals for unrealised/potential artworks or design projects. All submissions fitting this brief are included in this catalogue.

If the catalogue highlights the idea of, or ideas behind an artwork, the exhibition grapples with what happens to these ideas after their realization in concrete form. Together these contexts present different aspects of the research process, and in so doing question where the boundaries between the artwork and research are, and indeed, where the work itself resides. The conference will explore how individual practitioners understand this relationship and how reflection comes into their practices as artists and researchers.

This is Future Reflections first project launching an ongoing enquiry into the slippage between art and research at Chelsea College of Art and Design and beyond. Future Reflections will thus continue after the conference and exhibition. Beginning in the form of a website that will be linked to the Chelsea research website: www.chelsearesearch.org

Future Reflections Committee