Design and Fine Art come together to build an inspiring new exhibition entitled ‘Under Construction’, which opens at Lancaster University in June.

2018 sees the first BA (Hons) Design course students graduating at Lancaster which means their work will be presented, along with that of BA (Hons) Fine Art students, at the University’s Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) Degree Show for the first time.

The culmination of three years’ hard work, the exhibition will showcase a diverse range of visual and interactive futuristic design concepts and artworks.

Design students will present their work in two studios.

The first will explore speculative futures of urban environments to create positive change for people and the planet. The students’ work focuses on the Northern Quarter of Manchester, where they conducted a robust site analysis before working on both physical and digital designs that propose radical and innovative solutions within the city.

The second studio will explore consumer technologies in the near and more distant future including, for example, student Tali Cahani’s colour-changing mask, a fictional artefact, which leaps forward to a time when fashion and cosmetics might respond to automated digital surveillance.

The mask, presented as a packaged product with user manual, is designed to ‘fool’ facial recognition and tracking systems, giving the wearer privacy in a not-so-distant future of ubiquitous and pervasive automated surveillance.

Other work in this studio includes fictional home agriculture systems, virtual exhibits of extinct wildlife and corporate visions from a deep-sea mining corporation.

The Fine Art displays will feature innovation and exploration across a broad range of practices including interactive and perceptual digital art through to the more tangible arts of painting and sculpture.

Claire Ward’s incredible life size drawing of a polar bear, Paula Kolar’s focus on ‘migration’ using interactive installations, live performances and printed works together with Emily Trowell’s sensory installations that mimic and explore virtual worlds through gaming platforms make this exhibition rich with various topics, practices and disciplines.

Director of LICA Professor Judith Mottram said: “I’m delighted at the diversity of work being presented by our two cohorts of students. It reflects their achievements and gives us a special opportunity to reflect on how fine art and design both tell us more about the world we do live in, as well as how we might live.”

The free exhibition, open to the public, takes place in three neighbouring locations on campus – The Peter Scott Gallery, Bowland Studios and the LICA building.

The work will be presented from June 20 to 30 (weekdays 11am to 5pm, Saturday 11am to 4pm, closed Sundays), with a private view, featuring live performances by some of the artists, on June 19 (6.30pm to 8.30pm). For more information please email lancasterdegreeshow2018@gmail.com