Demo-lition march 10.11.10

Found this on the guardian website, a photo of Kingston University, our banner and demonstrating! It's been an incredible day, even on the way to the train station you could see the students gathering with placards and banners. Once there the march was peaceful, the turn out - incredible, some saying it got up to about 40,000, with an intially estimated 20,000 people, this is epic. It was fantastic to vent some of the frustration over the whole issue. Sadly some people made it turn violent later on, but to be honest, I found it all very refreshing and it felt like it cut through all the bullshit politicians send our way, they won't listen to us, generally are rubbish at answering questions, and really what did they expect if they were going to put the fees up by 3 fold. They keep saying that they're moving the threshold to pay back up to £20,000, but then we have to pay back at the full whack of the tax rate, and to be honest paying back £30,000 is not an enjoyable prospect. We're also told that they're going to help the very poor, the rich are fine, so what about the middle class? I think it's going to create an elitist system, where the richest are the most educated, god knows how the rest of us are supposed to get an education. And of course the poor tutors at uni's are losing the teaching grants (except for the maths and science ones), so we're supposed to pay £30,000 for little or no teaching? People are raging on the news about how violent we all got, like that wasn't going to happen?? Of course it was going to happen, we all voted lib dems under the impression our fees were going to disappear or at least go down substantially, now having voted in the democracy we supposedly live in, this has happened, without even a referendum. The people rise up in demonstration, given no other choice, and we're belittled and fobbed off by more political smokescreen answers. I'm personally proud to have taken part in today, and sincerely hope something comes out of this, if nothing else a serious pang of guilt for the lib dems would be fantastic!

Is This Thing On?

Thanks to a particular student in my year 14 of us are exhibiting in the Dreamspace Gallery in East London in a months time. VERY excited about this, as it's a first step out in to the real art world outside of the university and Kingston in general. It's a showcase of work by us to show the response of artists at this time to the times we live in, not for a particular audience, or an institution, purely for the passion behind the work. So the private view is on 2nd December 6.30 til 8.30, and the exhibition will run for a week from 29th Nov - 3rd Dec. Hopefully it should be a good turn out!

Manifesto for the exhibition by Adam Jones:

With budget cuts, high intakes of students and an underwhelming amount of prospects it’s becoming an increasingly daunting prospect to start a career within the art world. With artists such as Hirst and Emin achieving such fame and recognition and making London once again the art capital of the world there is massive pressure on the new young artists to step into their shoes.

By showing different responses to the current post-recession climate, work is produced that speaks for a new generation of artists. This is how art is today, right now, not how the art market likes to tell us its supposed to be, not what the collectors are buying and certainly not what you would find in a commercial art shop. Instead this is art that is created with a passion, motivated by the possibility of success and most of all a focus on creating work most relevant to current issues facing contemporary culture.

What is vital for the artists involved is that who they are or where they come from should no longer matter; instead the art can speak for itself and for the individual who created it.