2012 has been a progressive and
eventful time for students at St Kevins College. With a special emphasis
on the Graduate exhibition, 2nd years have been developing and refining
projects through a series of critiques with in-house tutors and
visiting guests. Earlier this month Mike OToole - lecturer in IADT and a
successful photographer in his own right, carried out an excellent
workshop which was designed to offer support to technical and conceptual
issues in individuals work. Further, through an equally beneficial
workshop in Fire Design, students identified first hand the
possibilities within their own work, in terms of colour management and
presentation, as well as opening up personal and professional links to
this very inspiring and progressive Irish print management company.
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| Mike OToole Workshop, March 2012 |
The emphasis on professional development and practice this year has been
strong. In the current economic climate, the necessity for education
institutions to offer and encourage work-experience programmes has been
noted by the photographic programme staff in St Kevins College. The
experience of our 'Top Floor Studios' - a student run photography
studio, open over three days greatly enhanced each individuals
understanding of the technical, professional and personal skills
required to work in, and operate, a self contained commercial
photographic studio. Further, the special cross-college assignments with
students of the Fashion Design course in Crumlin College was a
beneficial and sucessful enterprise.
In 2012 progression has been the key to our ever-growing and ever-evolving photographic course. We are into the third year of our FETAC Level 6 course - an added addition to our established Higher National Diploma; the student numbers have expanded enormously and the standards and expectations have risen dramatically. The evidence of this can seen very clearly in the successes of our ex-students. Our links programmes with established Third-Level Institutions such as DIT and IADT have saw large numbers of students from St Kevins College progress directly to the 2nd year of 4 year degree programmes. This, for us, is a solid indication of the standards we have set, the structure of the programme and the passion of our photography staff to deliver something radical, innovative and essentially new to the landscape of photographic education in Ireland.
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| CDVEC Photography Competition - Hosted at St Kevins College, March 2012 |
Looking forward, we have been inundated with applications for next years courses. We feel that the growth and popularity of our photography course in recent years has down to our strong reputation which has been built over the last number of years. We feel that the sucesses of our course has been largely down to the synergy between tutor and students. The ongoing body-of-work critiques have formed the basis of our course structure. The process of creating and developing thematic projects throughout the year have pushed the boundaries of expectation for VEC colleges in Dublin. This will be evident in our Graduate Exhibition, which will this year take place over the weekend of 11th of May in The Exchange in Temple Bar. We are all excited about showcasing the best that the course has to offer and promoting the uniqueness that our college provides.
- Martin Cregg
