UNI COLLAGE

The bulk of the final image came from a collage I made and drew based around the idea that had been floating around my head for a while; some kind of depiction of university as the 'safe' place and the student emerging into the 'real' world or using the university as an 'anchor' somehow. I wanted to include elements which would suggest that the university was being threatened by external (and perhaps internal) pressures i.e. the process of marketisation, overwhelming bureaucracy, student apathy, etc. Easy.

I had some sort of nightmarish environment envisioned for the student after university, with limited employment opportunities, the burden of debt, public and political indifference or malice, and so on. I also wanted to include some staggering drunks as some kind of allusion to hypocrisy of some kind.

Also lots of things went in that I had not intended, which is just as well.

The collage elements I included came mostly from two magazines we had to hand in the studio - Art Student and Campaign, copies of which were strewn everywhere, also a spiralling black and white design I photocopied from a student's A4 ring binder. Elements I can identify are as follows:

• Several adverts for art materials and shops (the paintbrushes and bottles of ink)

• Something by (I think) Simone Lia which i drew over and became a cafe

• The businessman with oversized tennis racket standing in some kind of paradise environment comes from a photograph by the German mixed-media artist Friedrich Kunath. This seemed to represent to me a rich/poor dichotomy egregious in modern late capitalism; the international financier living in the lap of luxury, spewing meaningless blasé - 'Join the queue chum'.

• Jamie Tobin's car - this became the cab/limo of the evil capitalist vampire

• Jonathan Cooper's troubled man which became an advert for the university help zone

The image was not initially intended as my final OLIO piece so was not done quite in the correct OLIO proportions or with the double-page considerations in mind. This created some problems later when I did decide to use parts of it in the final piece.