Open Day - Meet our students
Published on the 22 Aug 2016
At Open Day on Saturday 3 September discover how UNSW Art & Design can support you to realise your artistic, creative and professional potential.
Visit our purpose-built creative Paddington campus and experience the unmatched range of fine art studios, design labs, media production facilities, galleries and exhibition spaces we offer.
Participate in tours, view cutting-edge exhibitions, workshops and other events and take the chance to meet some of our current students and dedicated creative staff.
Meet some our creative students below.
Current design student at UNSW Art & Design, Martina Calvi, proves a good idea can go a long way. She’s enamoured with pop culture from the 80s and 90s, and although she wasn't around in the 80s and most of the 90s, her take on these decades-gone-by is decidedly fresh and constructed through a contemporary (and tech savvy) lens. Working in a palette of candy pinks and blues, and featuring visuals of hotpants, sneakers, scrunched socks, baby doll dresses, glam t-shirt clips, oversized sunglasses, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts, and acid washed everything, Martina’s designs are eye-popping. Her lateral thinking matches retro concepts to the desires of contemporary markets. She designs advertising campaigns, t-shirts, nail art, Shrink Dink jewellery, backpacks, buttons, embroidered pencil bags, screen-printed bedding, and framed original artworks.
Martina’s popularity is undeniable, and is one reason she’s been selected to provide design elements for UNSW Art & Design’s 2016 Open Day. Get your collection of Martina's original stickers and postcards in this year’s welcome bag when you visit our campus on Open Day, and check out more of her work here.
Currently enrolled in a Fine Arts degree specialising in photography at UNSW Art & Design, Sophie Norsa is widening her creative experience and expertise. She’s already known to many in the world of children’s book illustration as the creator of the much-loved character 'Matilda the Mouse'. Sophie’s rise in the field of illustration began when her talents were noticed during a work-experience placement at New Frontier Publishing, a Central Coast- based company specialising in picture books and junior fiction. Her style is magically cheery, but it’s her detailed method of making that marks her works as exceptional. Sophie aims to visualise the story through the imagination of a child, incorporating the requisite cheeky characters, colourful berries and bugs, and of course a multitude of presents. Her initial pencil sketches are quick and light. She adds life with the application of thin layers of watercolour, intermittently deepened with pen and ink. Sophie was short-listed for the Crichton Award for New Illustrators, supported by the Children’s Book Council of Australia for her work on Yellow Dress Day and Matilda Saves Santa Claus.
During Open Day at UNSW Art & Design, Sophie will be located in the photography area on campus. Say hello when you come by. Sophie is interested to share her ideas about different modes of creative production and the benefits of exploring new techniques and processes. And she has particular insight into the benefits of professional experience work placement as part of our degree programs. Stop in and see her on 3 September.
UNSW Art & Design offers an unmatched range of degree options. As one of Australia's leading global universities our students can study and explore the breadth and range of contemporary creativity and career pathways. When Amy Ge enrolled at UNSW Art & Design, focusing on graphic design and animation she was aiming to be a children’s book illustrator, however now at UNSW while considering how best to achieve this goal, Amy has realised it that is invaluable to understand narrative-building processes for both moving and still visual composition and sequence development. During her study she has also recognised that her work is energised when she incorporates new and unexpected elements. Amy says having access to discreet yet complementary creative, conceptual and technical knowledge and skill-sets has continued to widen and deepen her creativity.
Amy is one of many current students volunteering to help out on Open Day at UNSW Art & Design on 3 September. You’ll find her at the ‘Welcome' desk where she’ll be happy to tell you about her favourite campus hang-outs, give sage words of advice about the transition from high school to Uni, and direct you to the areas that best suits your interests.
Who said you can’t be an artist and a lawyer at the same time? According to Daniel Emmerig, who’s undertaking a combined Fine Arts / Law degree at UNSW, it’s the perfect combination. He’s able to explore and interrogate society from a structural point of view, in terms of how we regulate, uphold, and enforce behaviours through legislative institutions, and at the same time he’s able to fully exercise the other half of his brain revealing the world through visual expression. At UNSW Art & Design, Daniel is a prolific painter and printmaker. His work suggests the local influences of Reg Mombassa, Brett Whiteley, and historic symbolic hieroglyphic art. Full of visual references to iconic Sydney landmarks and a haunting and repeated theme of the eye of Horus – the all-seeing eye, often encased by the sun and symbolising protection, power, and health. Daniel sells his art through Saatchi Art and Indiewalls.
Daniel’s prints will also be for sale on Open Day in UNSW Art & Design's ever-popular Cicada Press printmaking sale (on campus in G Block). If you’re interested in acquiring an original artwork from him, or watching him making linocut work, come to our Open Day. Daniel is offering studio demonstrations all day. See more of his work here.
