School of Fine Art

I’d like to tell you how proud we are of you and how well you have done.

The rhetoric surrounding art is often about flexibility of approach, the ability to respond to and to shape events, but also the ability to see ahead (and behind) with freshness. You have managed all of this in unprecedented circumstances – really, really well done.

Zooming into the spectrum of your thinking and work and seeing the construction and assembling of your learning has been ‘knowledge freshening’ and remarkable. This has been made richer through your innovative use of materials, media, formats and sites. As ever, there are those who meet the stride of their work at just the right time, and others who will flourish further when the conditions change again and when you will be downloaded into our futures.

Zooming out, NCAD has worked hard in the most extraordinary circumstances to continue to be a resource for the teaching of contemporary art practice. This has required the ingenuity, invention and stamina of all our staff. NCAD has been leading in how it has enabled our fundamental resources of studio and workshops as essential to art practices and learning. We have argued for this in place of an entirely online approach, and delivered this when we could do so confidently and safely.

I would like to shout out to all of those who have supported you and us through their different skills to remake and to sustain our learning environments as effective and robust. The further effort of those supporting hearts and minds to manage and prosper in tricky circumstances has also been essential – this when at different times every one has felt at the end of their tether.

So, with heat in the air and with our graduate platforms enabled, your work is being unfurled now and for the future. Enjoy it and welcome to the work everyone however and whenever you meet it.

Professor Philip Napier
Head of the School of Fine Art