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Alumni Interviews

Susan Forsythe

Artist

What have you been doing since graduating?

Before starting the Fine Art course I had completed a Law degree, a Post Graduate Certificate in Education and taught in primary schools so it was easy for me to continue teaching for a living. I was able to finish this in April and concentrate more on my own business of selling work and completing small commissions. I am currently working on a 20ft mural in a Sure Start Centre in Feltham, South London that was commissioned from a print that had been seen in my open studio.

What expectations did you have?

I was a practicing artist before the course and I knew that having a good institution on my CV would open many doors. I wanted to get recognised training to enable me to start a professional career at a high profile institution. It has overreached my expectations and opened up so much more for me than I could have imagined. In April 2006 I worked as an intern at Chelsea Space Gallery where I was hanging famous artists’ work, which was an amazing experience for me. I found this internship through being a student at Chelsea and being proactive in searching for opportunities.

What has the transition from your studies to your current life been like?

Since this is a part-time course and I was working previously, it has been a very good transition but it feels like just the beginning of my career. If I had studied full-time I would have had much more intense teaching, with weekly tutorials and would have had free access to the workshops. But, I would have struggled to fit in with the other straight-from-school students.
Chelsea has been really solid and is well-recognised, which has given me a lot of confidence and I feel will stand me in good stead for the future. However, there were no specific activities to prepare us for completion - in general the careers/further education advice was non-existent at Chelsea.
I feel that I took all the opportunities that I could and now I am continuing my studies with an MA at Kingston University. I felt that my practice was not complete and needed a period of full-time study to consolidate my ideas and to develop a critical vocabulary.

Is there one thing that you would tell a current student that would help them when they graduate?

• Record all your work at every stage and record it at whatever price you can afford, e.g. slides, CDs, film, and make sure that you archive everything. It is such a loop process as ideas that you discarded before come back to you 3 years later and you don’t want to be scrabbling around trying to get records of your previous ideas.
• Take your work seriously.
• Get your own space to work if possible as it will give you a small thinking space outside your home. If this is difficult then see if you can timeshare a space with other artists.