Sustainability, mental health, body positivity, the impact of bullying, and social media addiction are among the key contemporary themes being explored at this year’s TUS Athlone Campus Graduate Showcase, which opens its doors to the public this week and runs until Wednesday, May 24.
‘Velocity’ brings together the work of 80 emerging designers and visual artists, showcased through a variety of mediums, including short film, video game audio, augmented and immersive reality, posters, and wearable technology.
The interdisciplinary showcase, which features work from students in the BA in Graphic Design, BA (Hons ) in Graphic & Digital Design, and BA (Hons ) in Animation & Illustration, also includes work from the first graduating class of the BSc (Hons ) in Music & Sound Engineering this year.
“We are very excited for our first group of final-year music and sound engineering students to be showcasing their work at this year’s exhibition. Our students are exhibiting a wide variety of work ranging from music composition portfolios, audio visual composition, short film, video game audio, wearable technology, and generative audio through digital body capture,” Mike O’Dowd, programme leader of the BSc (Hons ) in Music and Sound Engineering, said.
Students from the BA (Hons ) in Animation and Illustration – the only programme to combine both animation and illustration at undergraduate or postgraduate level in Ireland – have displayed their talents through illustrated graphics novels, picture journals, immersive games, augmented experiences and animated films.
“They have produced fabulous, wild and wonderful illustrated, animated, augmented and immersive projects for their final year submissions, which showcases their individual interests, their study of the world around them and their capturing and dissemination of this intrigue through form, colour, texture, extended and augmented realities and of course, movement,” Yvonne Hennessy, programme coordinator for the BA (Hons ) in Animation and Illustration, remarked.
According to Tara Cullen, programme coordinator for both the BA in Graphic Design and BA (Hons ) in Graphic and Digital Design, the showcase gives students the opportunity to “exhibit all their talents and creativity” after being “nurtured by a team of dedicated lecturers here in Athlone”.
“We have seen the students flourish and now they have the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to go out into industry as fully rounded designers.
“They’ve worked hard all semester on their final projects to showcase that by researching, conceptualising and solving problems on a number of current issues, from sustainability to social media addiction to bullying. It is great to see the projects come to fruition,” she added.
Breda Lynch, who heads the Department of Polymer, Mechanical and Design, said students can be “incredibly proud of their achievements” as they showcase their final graduate work and embark on “exciting and rewarding career paths”.
“Over the course of their studies here in at TUS Athlone Campus, each student has developed their own unique set of skills: creative, innovative; critical thinker and technically competent,” she commented.
The TUS Graduate Showcase 2023, which was launched by Mary Doherty, founder of Red Dog and president of the Institute of Designers in Ireland (IDI ), is open to the public until May 24, from 10am-4pm, in the Engineering Building, TUS Athlone Campus.
