Personal Statement

Throughout my academic art career, both at Foundation level at DeMontfort University and throughout my BA in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, my practice has leaned strongly toward the figurative. Although I have a broad grounding in the conceptual, my passions are for illustration, paint, photography and model work. I am now looking to combine this Fine Art expertise with my long-standing love of gaming and animation to pursue a career in the games industry. The Journey to this has began from doing a level 3 course in Game art design at Nottingham College.

My interest in gaming and animation stems from winning my first console in a raffle, at the age of 6, little more than a year after my family moved to the UK from India in 1996. I was enthralled by playing classic Nintendo 64 games such as Zelda Ocarina of Time, Mario 64 and Pokemon Stadium. Not long after I came to love Asian animation, including Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon and Studio Ghibli.

The game franchise I have kept returning to throughout my gaming life is Zelda, in large part because of its RPG format and its strong stylistic similarity to fantasy animation. For instance, Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) creates a cinematic world reminiscent not only of Studio Ghibli works such as Castle in the Sky (1986) and Spirited Away (2001) but also the Harry Potter series. My ambition is to create games in which vivid artwork works with the gameplay to create just such immersive worlds and stories.

My strongly figurative practice will be an asset. During my degree in Fine, my final year consisted of painting and photography, especially nude painting and photography with myself as the subject. I found it fascinating to explore the issue of ‘body shaming’ in men through paint and my own distinctive vision of the nude. My work made use of bold circles of colour and elongated shapes, using previous experiments in abstract to was accentuate the real over the ideal the media prefers to show us In my end of year’s exhibition, I contrasted these semi-abstract paintings with the ‘realism’ of my photographic, confronting the viewer with the development of my perception of the body. Along the way I also experimented with maquettes made from soda cans and crisp packets to represent the consumer and dietary side of negative body image. And although this was ultimately unsuccessful, it allowed me to explore the concept in three dimensions, and deepen my skill in model work.

Outside of my course work, I also contributed to and co-curated some several group exhibitions under the banner Three and Half Indians. This semi-ironic project was aimed at showing how our work went beyond narrow perceptions of our  Indian heritage, culture and religion. It was about how we as ‘Indian westerners’ understood conceptual art, and the way we placed ourselves in the culture of the UK. In my eyes I thought it was a bit like the DADA movement; it was about mischievously breaking stereotypes of Indian art. And this is something I will continue to play with as an animator. Just as Japanese film-makers and games designers have drawn on their country’s mythology to create new works of pop culture, I look forward to drawing on the epics of the Hindu pantheon in my work: the West is now familiar with the rich cinema of Bollywood, so why not games that draw on the same inspiration?

Although my artistic leaning is figurative, the grounding in the conceptual approach I was given at MMU will also help me in my MA course in animation at NTU. A conceptual practice challenges students to think beyond established styles and trends, and realise their ideas unconventionally.

The reason I have chosen to apply for the MA course in Animation at Nottingham Trent University specifically is that Nottingham has a great expanding games industry of its own and Nottingham Trent is renowned for the strength of both its creative and technological curricula, bringing them together in initiatives like the Confetti Institute,. I am especially hungry to explore the programs and software that will be used in the course, such as Wacom Cintiq, 3D Max Studio, Photoshop, After-eefects and Premier pro, as I appreciate these will equip me with crucial practical expertise for my future career. I have experimented with making simple flip-book and stop-motion videos on Dragonframe in the past. However, I want to expand my knowledge and experience in other fields of software and animation development programs.

My aspiration is to make my art come to life, and my imaginings playable. What I experienced playing my first game and watching my first anime – the thrill and the sheer amazement at immersing myself in a fantasy world – is something I want to live in my career, by creating my very own games and animations.

C.V.