Rooted in the City: Emma’s Artistic Awakening on the City Lit Foundation Diploma

Top image: bark texture study for FMP

From museum education to immersive art-making, Emma Pegram shares how the City Lit Foundation Diploma in Art & Design helped her bridge her professional expertise with her creative aspirations. As she prepares to exhibit her final piece in PROTO, the end-of-year show in Brixton, Emma reflects on a year of transformation, experimentation, and finding her voice as a ceramic artist.

I’m Emma Pegram and am a student on City Lit’s Foundation in Art and Design (FAD). My career has been in museum education and evaluating people’s experiences in exhibitions and events. This work is about understanding the impact of these experiences on different audiences. However, in my dream life I am a ceramic artist! I’ve been doing pottery on and off in adult education courses for 20+ years. I enrolled in FAD because I want to bring together the knowledge and skills from my professional career with my practice as an artist. I’m curious about participatory art (with clay) and using this to explore learning and emotion with people. But to do so I needed to open up to new ways of thinking and learn how to be more creative.

Visitors can expect a diverse and thought-provoking collection of work from students who have each followed their own creative journey. The show is a culmination of a year of exploration, experimentation, and personal growth. It’s a chance to see how each of us has interpreted our ideas and passions through different media and approaches.

I feel a responsibility to use my art as a platform for raising awareness of issues affecting/effected by the climate and biodiversity emergencies. Environmental messaging, therefore, has underpinned most of the projects I have done during Foundation. I’ve been exploring how to deliver this message as an artist instead of as an educator (my default) and have learned a lot from feedback from students and tutors on each project.

For the final show I wanted to focus on our disconnect with nature and to use urban trees as the subject. I was keen to find a new and positive angle that might prompt people to notice and value trees more. I came across the definition of London as ‘a forest’ which students and tutors found curious and surprising so used this as my starting point. If ‘London is a forest’, what does the woodland of Covent Garden look like? Over a few days in the Easter break I surveyed the streets of Covent Garden and recorded 427 trees (63 different species)!

My work in the show has 3 elements: a floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawing of a tree trunk with the survey data ‘scratched’ into it, a film of close-up footage of the trees we pass by and ignore on the streets of Covent Garden, and an invitation to remember ways you might have valued trees in the past. Given my professional background, I’ve focussed on the experience these pieces create and whether people might leave with a new interest in trees. My tutor told me the other day that he’d started to look more closely at the trees on the way to the tube – a win!

I’ve really enjoyed the encouragement to find our own authenticity, to understand what it is you make, how and why. I knew that disinterest/lack of understanding of biodiversity and climate issues was the subject that drives me, but I’ve been learning about the context that I bring and also how I like to make. For example, I realised I have a need to physically do something – walk the streets of Covent Garden, lay out a line of squashed aluminium cans on the road (Unit 2 project) – not necessarily for an audience but as part of the process of making art. I’ve enjoyed interacting with the public when I was doing these things too. Understanding how I like to make has undoubtedly made me start to feel confident in my work and to begin to (tentatively) own the description of ‘an artist’!

Demob happy after handing in our Unit 2 assessments, the Contemporary Practice group visited Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern and then went back to the studio to make costumes while dancing to The Fall. I loved it! 

Being told in my first tutorial that the slides I had prepared for assessment were “too reticent”. It was the kick that I needed!

I have applied for a place on City Lit’s ceramics diploma – I want to explore my new creative skills and approaches to making art further and have an innate need to get back to clay. I’m interested in expanded practices in ceramics, working with raw clay, film and participation. I know this because of my experience on Foundation and I can’t wait to see where these explorations might take me!

Study UAL Foundation Diploma in Art & Design

City Lit’s UAL Foundation Diploma in Art & Design is a hands-on, year-long course that builds your creative skills and portfolio, preparing you for art school, university, or a career in the creative industries.