Paul Chisholm didn’t know what to expect when he uploaded his work to Graduate Showcase. Emerging from his Chelsea MA in Fine Art into a sector on pause, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, wasn’t easy. But when a curator got in touch after spotting his work on Showcase, he found himself preparing for his first official solo show...
There’s nothing quite like seeing an art exhibition in person. "The texture, the environment, the physical object - especially with sculpture or painting, there is something tangible and real about the work,” says Paul Chisholm. “But Showcase transcends boundaries, countries and time zones, allowing a much wider audience.”
Paul has firsthand experience of this. When we speak, he’s just back from a week in Folkestone for a presentation of his work at The Brewery Tap, run by UCA Farnham. Their programmer curators had emailed him in January 2023. “They’d found my work on UAL Graduate Showcase and they wanted to offer me a solo show,” he remembers.
“It was such a great opportunity, with no strings attached. It was simply: here’s the gallery, do what you want, we love your work.” Since then, he’s been awarded an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice grant, which will give him the chance to delve into researching LGBTQ+ history and culture. What’s more, he’s also been shortlisted for the Queer Britain Art Prize.
But in the months and years immediately after he completed his degree, in the midst of a global pandemic, opportunities to exhibit physically were limited. Though he and his peers did have a degree show as their course ended in December 2019, within the first quarter of the following year, the world screeched to a standstill. “2020 was a real letdown. It was so sad – I’d just graduated, I had all this energy. I was about to have a show at Hoxton 253 in the summer and everything got cancelled.”
That’s where Showcase came in – providing virtual viewers with instant access to his work. The installation shots from his show at Chelsea meant he had ample images to choose from. “That documentation gave me a way to present a body of work and gain more exhibitions,” he says. “I've always had my website, but Showcase is great because it's ranked more highly on Google so when people search for my work, it comes up.”
Paul’s Showcase project, The Lost Children of Paradise, is a series of paintings of clown-like faces that portray the masks we wear socially to hide our true emotions. “I was diagnosed with HIV in 2007. I’ve struggled with my mental health, living with a disability for a long time. I think the portraits are a reflection of that melancholic feeling,” he says. “I work with industrial materials – household paint on canvas or MDF boards. The process is quite organic, it just flows out of me.”
After studying BA Fine Art at Nottingham Trent, Paul became a full-time artist in 2015. Originally his work centered on conceptual sculpture but for the past five 5 years he’s also been exploring painting and decided to take up the Master’s to further push himself in this direction. During the forced isolation of lockdown, he made a new body of work titled The Tronies of Croydon-OH, which was exhibited at Turf Project Space in Croydon in 2022. “A tronie is a head-based portrait from the golden age of Dutch painting. My series explores how, communicating online via Zoom, you sometimes see people just as their headshot. It’s about our connection, or disconnection, during the pandemic.”
Though the timing of graduation was, in many ways, less than ideal, Paul’s post-university career is now on a roll. And being featured on graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk has been pivotal in this process. I feel like Showcase should be a mandatory part of the course curriculum,” he says, adding: “I’d really encourage every student to put their work up. Because you never know what may come out of it.”
Explore work by recent UAL graduates online at graduateshowcase.arts.ac.uk
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