For as long as I can remember, I have been eternally curious. As a child, questioning everything from nature to human behaviour was at my core. When I grew into these curiosities, I figured: why not have a little fun while exploring them?
Before I entered high school, I knew that I wanted to go past the confines of America and study abroad. While California provided tremendous opportunities, I couldn’t get past the transactional people who felt more overwhelming than the snakes of highways through concrete jungles in political disarray. When I would go abroad, I knew that I had to make the most of my passions. I had a specialism in agricultural science, a healthy background in American history, but a dream in the arts.
I had been accepted at many different universities, but the one I hoped to get into was AUB. The location, running a course that produced amazing work, at an art school with a real presence in the UK. I knew that I needed to come here. I applied to the BA (Hons) Fine Art course and was counter-offered a year on the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design. While my portfolio was more geared towards illustrative work, they enjoyed a video of me burning a painting I made of the Australian wildfires, and pushed me in the direction of graphic design. A year to experiment and learn more about the world and myself. A degree leading to a field and a way to explore my interests in science, history, and human questioning through the lens of art and design.
When I started Foundation, I felt like a fish out of water. What was I doing here? I was at these fancy computers, creating art on this nice campus where everyone talked funny, a million miles from home. It was a challenge I was keen to overcome. While I took time to understand everybody’s accents, I spent most of my time on my coursework.
Foundation was divided into two parts across three trimesters: Art, Media and Design, and a specialism. During the first couple of months, we developed concepts into individual projects. When I started the Art, Media and Design unit, I didn’t know what type of artist I wanted to be. What was the purpose behind my artwork? What was I trying to say? Coming out of the pandemic in America, being shut indoors for five months, and then living in another country for four-and-a-half, my world and sense of self were completely upside-down. I had to reinvent myself using what I had – ideas. I looked inwards and the same questions kept bubbling up. What am I doing? Why am I here? What am I trying to answer?
I came out of that unit with ideas in the form of answers for myself. I began defining my future through abstract shapes and colours. Tackling human interconnectivity through political fashion conceptualisation, room energy maps, and landscapes defining balance between positivity and negativity. I grooved emotions into paper with a pencil to create my own interpretations of words. This whole time, I had questioned what I wanted to say, but when it came to creating a message from the core of my being where I thought there was nothing, I found something. That something always pushed me to bring people together, to have fun, and to let other people see the best in themselves by becoming the best version of myself.
Once I started spending most of my time on campus, I learned just how much of an extrovert I am. When making art or walking around during lunch, I would almost always make a new friend. Despite my home being far away, I felt a new one forming. I had come out the other side stronger, with friends and some artwork and ideas under my belt, proving to myself that I could be an artist – not just as a job, but as a lifestyle.
When choosing my specialism, I realised graphic design was where my ideas had the most room to grow. My strong ideas to visualise human interconnectivity would take any form necessary, and I was willing to grow with them to see them through. After coming home for the holidays, COVID-19 really hit the UK and I spent the rest of my Foundation year online. When I finished, I submitted works surrounding the aspirations of positivity within the human body, a font empowered by a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., and a design undermining technology’s false perception of beauty. While those six months were difficult because of the time zones, I couldn’t wait to get back and give it my all with nothing holding me back.
Coming onto the BA (Hons) Graphic Design course, I hit the ground running at 200%. Before university started, I met with the course leader Marion Morrison, and Andy Vella, who was leading the upcoming unit. This was it. I was ready to put everything I’d felt and experienced into this moment. I would prove my worth and be the best at everything I did. That level of ambition was overwhelming, and the beginning of the course was like a tsunami – a calm wave that would grow into a gigantic force of nature.
In America, it’s a meat grinder. I was used to starting at 07.00 on the dot. Now, I was in a new environment. Slowly, I felt the flow of the class, and after meeting the amazing staff, I became keener to learn about my peers – who would be ahead of the bell curve, who were the smaller voices that would grow, and who could I learn from the most.
Being a designer is like baking. First, you get your ingredients: paint strokes, pencil sketches, drawings, sculptures, materials. Then, you get your mixing bowl; you transform the ingredients with qualities you desire: friendly, creative, fresh, new, alluring, exciting, whatever you fancy. Next, grab your baking tray: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Blender, After Effects, and you cook up a cool design. Finally, you put it in the oven with a tray: make it into a poster, a moving image, a campaign, a zine, a video, a format of media which a process makes it into a finished product! When I finally realised my design process, everything clicked. That moment was priceless.
When I initially came to BA (Hons) Graphic Design at AUB, I carried with me a sense of purpose, made of two halves. Half of me wanted to make personal and universal design; the other felt that I needed to build skills towards representing marginalised groups through creative platforms. If I wasn’t doing everything I could to support people who were worse off than me, what was I even doing? Eventually, by the end of first year, it felt like I had accomplished everything I set out for myself.
For Superpeople, I collaborated with BA (Hons) Illustration and Bournemouth and Poole College to create business cards that would get people with disabilities their dream job. For the In a Pot of Hot Soup exhibition, I closely worked with my course, as well as Dr Paula Callus, Dr Charles Gore, and Nigerian artists to create a zine for the event’s launch. I made such a massive leap from where I was at the end of Foundation. I had become a designer who didn’t dream up concepts but made a real-world impact on people’s lives. I wasn’t asking, “What am I doing here?”
After being on Foundation, and then coming to the BA, I had completely levelled up. My design process was streamlined. I was able to handle bigger workloads and shorter turnarounds. I was able to put others first, empathise, and produce work that ignited their passions and enabled them to grow to new heights. First year was extremely fulfilling, but I was still hungry. I couldn’t help but wonder: what’s the next best thing? What were the steps I could take to becoming the best designer I could possibly become? Were the briefs I accomplished now what I would do for the rest of my career? Had I really accomplished everything I wanted to do? What other expressions of art were out there, and who were the artists making them?
