University College Falmouth

The Barns-Graham Scholarship to support an Undergraduate Student on BA (Hons.) Fine Art Course, selected on merit; The Barns-Graham Travel to Italy Award for Fine Art student (undergraduate or postgraduate) who are graduating from University College, to fund an extracurricular but subject related trip to Italy; Student Hardship Fund.

“I went to Italy in search of the new mask of commedia dell arte, worn by the women of the Italian media, but whilst there I realized that there was more to contend with.Commedia del arte marks the birth of modern theatre; it is a genre  which transcends time and place because it is the enactment of the collective psyche. I saw the generic archetypes, charactured (sic) in the leather masks; the old, the impoverished, the merchant and the lovers. They surrounded me as I walked around, Rome, Florence, Calvi, Venice and Milan . Commedia dell arte is snapshot of Humankind going about his daily business, making love, finding food, impressing his neighbours and earning money conveying our need to survive from day to day. When a mask is worn, the face is no longer mobile it becomes fixed to whatever expression the mask dictates. Face and Voice become secondary to the physical. Gesture, posture and the space between bodies become the key communicator. I am now in the process of creating storyboards for my own commedia play, using Italian television and political personalities in accordance to the stock characters in commedia dell arte to create my own masks. I will then be performing small improvisations based on my storyboards in response to this trip.”