Dean's Bulletin
There's a lot happening at the moment around preparing for the Winter Graduation ceremonies, student numbers planning for 2012 and of course the multi million pound accommodation project which will see the closure of Ashburne House next summer.
Disruptive as the building work at Priestman, St Mary's and the National Glass Centre is going to be over the next few months, let's not forget it represents a major investment in Sunderland's Cultural and Creative Industries. The £10m renovation programme across the three buildings will bring new opportunities around provision and practise in fine art, art and design foundation, glass and ceramics, photography and performing arts.
Fine Art and Performing Arts will be housed in the historic Priestman Building in Sunderland city centre - which is to undergo a redesign and refurbishment from March 2012. The new layout will include new studios and a new art gallery. The distinctive St Mary's Building on the city centre campus will accommodate new Photography studios. And the National Glass Centre will become the base for more than fifty Art and Design Foundation students as well for the 100-plus students studying Glass and Ceramics. Meanwhile, a new state of the art Green Screen studio - which is used in special effects productions - has opened at the David Puttnam Media Centre on St Peters Campus alongside a new atrium radio studio for Spark.
More than two thousand students are now studying arts, design and media at Sunderland in some of the finest facilities and in the company of some of the finest staff anywhere in the country. The Student Experience and Graduate Employment are at the heart of our provision.
Leading players from the world of arts, design and media are linked in to the university through employment advisory boards, industry accreditation or as visiting lecturers. ITN is the university's Broadcast News Partner - which has resulted in staff and students working with television news professionals in London. Among the big names who've been working with students here in Sunderland are; composer and musician Will Todd, advertising executive Patrick Collister, Victoria White, Editor of Company magazine, screenwriter Michael Chaplin, opera star Graeme Danby, media entrepreneur Alex Connock and the Director of BBC North, Peter Salmon.
It's important to us that our students are well linked in to the industries in which they are planning to work. So work experience, industry visits, guest lectures, Masterclasses and final year shows and exhibitions which showcase the talents of our graduates, combine to create a great student experience for those studying to enter the creative and cultural sector.
Show Time
I've been chatting to the President of the Students Union about the sheer volume of events, shows, performances and exhibitions being staged at any given time in and around Sunderland. We hear about some of them via email, others on the university and faculty websites and many are picked up on social networks. Our multi award-winning Spark radio and on-line production team are brilliant at publicising What's On around the city. And of course, there's word of mouth - that old-fashioned, but still effective, channel of communication.
But, even when we do get to know about these exhibitions and happenings, there are clearly not enough hours in the day to take in everything that's on offer - music, theatre, galleries, guest lectures, networking events, screenings, conferences and concerts. And in a faculty like ours - immersed in the world of creativity and culture - you can sometimes take for granted the range and quality of these activities. But in my experience, it's always worth making the effort to go along. Attendance is fun and it's also quite often genuinely surprising.
Take for example the amazing new show at the National Glass Centre. Kith and Kin is a wonderful showcase for talented colleagues such as Colin Rennie, Andrew Livingstone and James Maskrey. I found it impressive, accessible and quite marvellous. I was particularly intrigued by Jeff Sarmiento and Erin Dickson's ceiling to floor glass sculpture Emotional Leak. Imagine liquid draining from a pipe or a bottle in slow motion and pooling across the floorboards. Brilliant, beautiful and painstakingly put together.
It's been a busy month for shows. Andrew Richardson's Pixel Ware exhibition has opened to great acclaim at Durham University's Oriental Museum. It's a new digital artwork which links innovative digital interaction alongside traditional decorative Chinese ceramic design - inspired by Durham's world-renowned collection of Oriental ceramics. Watch out also over the next few days for the opening of a major Calligraphy show at the Design Centre.
Further afield, the Turner Prize exhibition has had them queuing round the block at the Baltic. I was lucky enough to get to one of the previews. We can't under-estimate the importance of dragging the show out of London and in to the North East. Great for the profile of contemporary art in the North of England.
The former MP for Sunderland South Chris Mullin has been back at Live Theatre in Newcastle to see Michael Chaplin's entertaining adaptation of his Westminster diaries. The play - A Walk On Part - has been receiving a final polish before transferring to London. That's now two Live Theatre productions playing in the West End. The other is Lee Hall's memorable and hilarious essay on art, The Pitmen Painters, which is playing to packed houses at the Duchess Theatre. Catch both if you can.
Sunderland's emerging economic masterplan for the creative industries could learn a lot from what's been happening across the Pennines in Liverpool. Similar story. Thriving Victorian industrial city forced to re-invent itself for the twenty first century. At the weekend I visited two very different galleries - Tate Liverpool and The Beatles Story. The first, a thrilling celebration of really amazing contemporary art from Picasso and Hepworth to Dali and the hat-maker Philip Treacy. The second, an ingenious multi-media experience marking the contribution of John, George, Paul and Ringo to Liverpool and the world of music. Both venues were packed. Evidence yet again of the importance of culture and the creative industries to the UK economy.
It also got me thinking again about how the North of England has got so much to offer in comparison to the crowded, over-priced capital. My friend the media entrepreneur Alex Connock who set up the Ten Alps production business with Bob Geldof is now an enthusiastic champion of the North as a base for digital and media businesses. His favourite pastime is to good-naturedly bait the London media elite about their horror at the prospect of stepping beyond the M25. The BBC's decision to move several departments to MediaCity in Salford is still viewed by many in the capital as cultural vandalism.
He recently stirred up a storm at BAFTA by calling for the BBC to move even more departments out of London.
His argument is that if you look around the world, most of the leading global brands are housed not in capital cities, but in small towns and suburbs. As examples he cited Google (Menlo Park), Facebook (Palo Alto), Microsoft and Amazon (Seattle), Apple (Cupertino) with a host of the world's other top brands based in towns and cities a fraction the size of Sunderland. You can read Alex's speech here.
Graeme Thompson
Dean
