letter to peeps in charge

We would prefer to stay in our own building due to our facilities being more appropriate and suitable to our course. Main site doesn’t fully equip our needs, the space available to use now in the studios are a fantastic size and placing us into a normal classroom surrounded by hooligans would stunt our creative flow. Being in our own building surrounded by other creative students helps us to be more open and move in a direction in which other creatives understand, being with other non creative students some may find work offensive that they do not understand. With this in mind, we would like to be able to access the facilities in the Rotherham college. As although the space provided for us is adequate we do not have all the facilities needed to progress. If it us unavailable to us to travel to the other college we do have some points for improving our site:

In the textile room we would like to request a specialised teacher in this area and/or better facilities available. The room we have at the minute which is the smallest room in the building also doubles up as a ‘common room/eating area’, which as you will blatantly see is not idealistic. Coming on from this, a specific area for our group to eat lunches/commerce would be nice. We thought that the space in front of our building is wasted and a small extension adding one extra room would benefit us greatly. There is a bistro on main site, but as I have stated before the creative students would prefer to stay away from that area, the bistro food is not suitable for everyone a prime example, the only vegan option is chips. We find this a main problem in our college, there a few vegan students in the creative sector and the fact they have no healthy and evenly priced option is disgraceful. Also the bursary provided for students doesn’t even cover a basic meal deal in the bistro, we know that prices are hard to change but it seems unfair that students who can’t afford it can’t have a decent meal, which is the whole point of bursary.

If I could just go back to the wasted space, we feel that especially the ‘car park’ in front of our building is a waste, the reason we can’t park there is due to safety for students and yet the buses for college are now stored there. As I mentioned an extra building wouldn’t go amiss. Either for a new room with facilities or a room in which we can eat (vegan friendly food). The mount and the coach house although close to us doesn’t have any facilities useful to us, it is basically used for storage. They would be ideal if they were done to a standard that we could use, but due to health and safety we aren’t allowed in. The health and safety factors in the college are very confusing, although we understand that the use of health and safety and following it is the most important thing in college, we would like to understand why at the ages of 17 and up we can use materials that can seriously harm us if used inappropriately but we aren’t allowed in the coach house because it has stairs and we aren’t allowed to be alone with stairs…

The 3D room is a great size, the biggest problem for me is the smell from the drains. No matter what seems to be done to fix it, it comes back with a vengeance. We know that the smell is from us washing up in the sink but what is the alternative? The facilities available to us in the 3D are not adequate, we have clay but no kiln, wood but no wood working equipment. So to fix this we would like to request the following; a kiln, basic wood equipment, pottery wheel, clamp table.

We do have good quality cameras and are taught how to use them, so we often photograph our work especially within contemporary art. But we don’t have a ‘proper’ photography space. Although it’s a lot to ask it would be nice to have access to a dark room, or just a space for photographs, at the minute we set up paper against a wall and use that. With access to more facilities we could really delve into photography and learn a lot more.

Finally, we have a lot of wasted space as I have previously mentioned. What would be fantastic would be a sign to actually point out that this is the art area, when we first started no one had a clue that we were meant to be here and that this was an art building. We have grassy areas that wasted, a little landscape work never hurt anyone. We could easily pop up a shed area for storage so the storage area at the minute could be used as classrooms again. Just for more aesthetic reasons, grass an area out, pop a bench that isn’t rotten for everyone to sit. Basically use the wasted space.

Overall were happy with the actual building, the character and the fact it doesn’t matter so much if there’s a little paint on the floor, but there are definite improvements just with the organisational skills and facilities.