Coming together as artists, designers and performers to explore common themes, seven of our BA courses will participate in Creative Unions this year. From academic year 2024-25, it will be part of the student experience for every Central Saint Martins undergraduate.
Creative Unions is a unique opportunity to socialise, connect and make together in new ways outside of familiar course environments, with activations in public spaces, group socials, guest speakers and facilitated sessions. Last summer, at an open-air event in Waterlow Park in north London, students co-built a public sculpture with clay and placards to explore climate justice themes. Alongside this, students met regularly, working in cross-course teams, to investigate socially responsible models of collaboration and how concepts of identity, empathy and ethics support such practice.
The unit promotes an intersectional approach to understanding environmental and social themes, taking the position that the systems of exploitation that oppress people also degrade our natural world. Intersectionality within art, design and performance is a frame to consider how our work will be experienced by people across all of society at the beginning of a creative process.
Creative Unions is delivered by a team of staff facilitators from different disciplinary backgrounds and is the first unit to be shared by all Central Saint Martins BA courses. The content supports many other collaborative learning practices across the College, and similar approaches can be found in our postgraduate courses.
More than 500 first and second-year students took Creative Unions in May-June 2023. People’s experiences of the unit so far show us that we can expect complexity and challenge, but equally that there is growth and value in working with different perspectives. Working in this way we can grow together as a learning community of practitioners and develop confidence in collaborative practice.
As we continue to deliver Creative Unions, the unit will evolve in response to student and staff feedback and reflecting our changing relationships to the world around us.
Has the Creative Unions unit influenced the way you approach or make work, and if so how?
“I feel that this course unit has pulled me from the perspective of a student, I felt the social awareness and responsibility that an artist needs to have. I would start thinking about how to balance the conceptual and practical aspects of art, individualism and collectivism.”
What did you find interesting about the collaboration?
“Working with students in different art fields has been very rewarding. Although there are also difficulties and challenges in the process, it is precisely this course that allows me to learn more about interdisciplinary communication and creation, which also changes the way I create art and the way I generate inspiration to a certain extent. It's exciting to learn a variety of skills and turn them into your own tools.”
Has the Creative Unions unit influenced the way you approach or make work - and if so how?
"I am more open to different perspectives and the potential that this may have. In the future, I will stay open to collaborating if I know that the expertise of others may enhance a project rather than trying to make it on my own, which will take much longer. In collaboration, a project can feel more powerful and somehow more possible since we all eventually benefit from the result.”
What did you find most interesting about the collaboration?
“The learning opportunity gained by paying attention to how each team player thinks and works. The project can develop quickly and exponentially if the collaboration is seen as an opportunity rather than a difficult task.”
The seven courses taking part this year are: BA Architecture, BA Ceramic Design, BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, BA Fine Art, BA Graphic Communication Design, BA Performance: Design and Practice, BA Product and Industrial Design..
We rounded up Creative Unions 2023 with an exhibition of some of the unit work in the Central Saint Martins Window Galleries last summer. Below are four of the projects featured in the exhibition.
This project aimed to combat the erasure of Palestinian culture and landscape through an open-call exhibition that would amplify Palestinian voices and serve as a heritage archive for 2023. The maze-like exhibition would encourage viewers to activate memory and knowledge by presenting artefacts that capture complex emotions and difficult experiences. Within the exhibition, the audience would discover publications, posters, immersive installations and sculptures that signalled Palestinian culture, defiance and place.
“We offer an infrastructure to support the voice of any people from Palestinian heritage, living there or abroad, with a promise of confidentiality and secrecy.” – Remember Palestine team.
Team 14B proposed three ways to make weddings less wasteful and organisers to be more environmentally conscious. Starting with portion control, they designed a two-tiered food stand divided into segments that acts as a guide for guests when plating up. The other methods involved promoting lab-grown diamond rings and recycled fabric material to be used as decoration. All of these outcomes sit within their brand identity, which features earthy colours and a logo.
“We are passionate about providing workshops for weddings at affordable prices so that people from all backgrounds can have the skills to create personalised decorations.” - Wasteless Weddings team
Inspired by Belgian household chicken coops, this group developed a variety of products that would work to cut down household waste by 50% per day. This includes a large chicken run with reinforced mesh, a chick coop made from moulded plastic, three types of feeders, a portable compost bin and an onsite bench. Through providing areas for people to meet and converse, this project also aims to reduce loneliness and improve social connectivity.
“Onsite compost bins situated next to chicken coop are used to dispose of waste material from coop clean outs. This generates nutrient rich compost that can be used to fertilise the raised beds”. – Eggschange team
Through their research, Team 25D identified that school children were at high risk of suffering major health consequences from air pollution. Particularly if they were of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic origin. Exploring the location of Lewisham, they found that dense housing, a school’s proximity to busy roads, and lack of greenery all contribute to children’s exposure to air pollution. To mitigate this exposure, they proposed a plant-filled playground that would provide much needed green space.
“Our focus is on how Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups in London are affected worse by the air pollution, especially the children of these communities who attend primary school.” –Play for Peace team