Create, critique, repeat? Polina Kim interviewed recent John Ruskin MFA graduate Laura Limbourg about the inner workings, of unknown to the public, of the school.
Oxford terms are intense. Lawyers, chemists, and engineers often complain of this to anyone who listens. What to do when the workload is heavy, and you aren’t even sure where to start? Laura says: “The creative process can’t be rushed, and the nine months [Ruskin] programme is highly criticised because of its short and condensed time frame. It’s a lot.” Let’s unpack exactly what goes on in the nine months.
The first term consists of visiting art shows in London and Oxford, with the aim of gaining curatorial, critical, and presenting skills. Alongside this are studio meetings with tutors in order to develop your portfolio and studio practice. “With the studio practice”, Laura says, “you have complete creative freedom: film, music, sculpture, whatever you choose.” Hilary? “Hilary gets tough: You finalise your essay, you have increasing meetings, you have a show with other students. Constructive criticism is constant, but you learn the most from this in my opinion.” Trinity is dedicated to finalising essays and a degree show “which you have just one week to install.”
Oxford’s renowned intensity translates into the requirement to be constantly creating, but this has not stopped Laura from developing her own style. Oxford granted her the space to discover what she wished to depict, helped her to find new symbolism for her work: “I learned a lot about Christian art at Oxford, being surrounded by it.” Before she came to Oxford, Laura’s art predominantly reflected on the issue of sex tourism in South East Asia. Yet after helping with charity work in Cambodia, the theme felt beyond her. It was at Oxford that she really had the chance to focus on this inner struggle and turned more to self portraiture.
Unlike some of her classmates, Laura already came with an established voice in art: this was her second master’s, coming from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. She said that in comparison to the education system of the latter, Ruskin was harder, due to having fewer visiting speakers and more tutorial times. She had a total of five different tutors with entirely different styles. This misalignment often left students torn between different expectations. And though she found their recommended resources helpful, there was not much room to experiment: “Ruskin unfortunately doesn’t give you the time for risks; it’s so short that they try to take people in who already know how to present their thoughts.”
It was the “presentation of thoughts” that she found the most fascinating aspect of being at Oxford. Initially worried about being looked down on by students from other departments at Oxford, she was pleasantly surprised to find everyone curious about her work in art. “I think every university should have this kind of intellectualism and diversity, and in fact what I loved most about Oxford was having these dinners and talking about art with people who study medicine or anthropology or history, and everyone just gives you a kind of opinion that’s different. Talking to a friend who does neuroscience, asking him in a very abstract way of [phenomena] he didn’t even think of – that’s what Oxford is about.” Nevertheless, she added that there were not many of these interactions with other departments. Even their lectures on art history were held separately from the art history students.
To come from what she called the “Czech bubble” to the cobbled streets of Oxford was fascinating, but also held its disappointments: “Without Modern Art Oxford the art scene would be pretty dead. Some student projects like The Old Fire Station have great shows and great space, but other than that there isn’t much going on because the school is so small. MFA is just sixteen students and they change every nine months – it is pretty hard to have an active art scene in a city this small.”
As a closing note, Laura gave advice to students considering Ruskin: “Don’t apply just for the Ruskin alone. The building is small, it’s not an ideal art school, but the location being Oxford is ideal. Think of applying for the undergraduate course, rather than the master’s, to avoid the rush. Most importantly: be someone who’s keen to learn and to thrive.”
