Ayeshah and Sarah are making an IMPACT

Cambridge School of Art postgraduate students selected for prestigious printmaking exhibition

Sarah Strachan (MA Fine Art) and Ayeshah Zolghadr (MA Printmaking) have had their collaborative exhibition curation proposal selected for the prestigious IMPACT12 International Printmaking Conference.

The conference will take place across Bristol from 22-25 September 2022. IMPACT stands for ‘International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking, Artists, Concepts and Techniques’ and over the past two decades it has emerged as Europe’s leading academic discourse on printmaking.

Both students are motivated by the idea of print processes as a kind of material thinking. Sarah transitions into print from sculpture and ceramics, and Ayeshah translates an architectural background into print and back again. Both continue to investigate the spaces in between 2D and 3D - as artists and curators, they are interested in liminal spaces.

Sarah and Ayeshah said: “We’re thrilled to have been selected to curate an exhibition in conjunction with the prestigious IMPACT conference and look forward to seeing the responses we get to our open call,”

Sarah and Ayeshah have also been selected to contribute to a new research project ‘Visions of the Future’. The project team, whose members including ARU historian Dr William Tullett, aim to explore how visions of future environments, technologies, social relations, and more from the 19th century have informed our own ability to imagine or make futures today.

Sarah and Ayeshah produced creative responses to a range of historical images gathered from online and archival collections, and presented their work at the website launch event on Monday 7 March.

Sarah’s response was a ceramic sculpture inspired by images from The Human Drift, a work of utopian social planning written by King Camp Gillette first published in 1894, while Ayeshah’s risograph prints respond to the conceptualised street lighting of ‘Guesses At Futurity — No.3’ presented in vol.4 of The Pall Mall magazine (1894) and etchings found in Hartmann the Anarchist (1892) that depict imagined aircraft.