The annual student art exhibition opened Thursday in the gallery corridor with a curatorial twist: every finished piece hangs beside its own history — sketches, abandoned drafts, colour tests, and in one case a first attempt with a hole torn through it.
The theme, “Unfinished,” came from the art society’s frustration with exhibitions that show only endpoints. “A finished piece is a magic trick,” said society president Ines Duarte. “We wanted to show the rabbit going into the hat. It’s more honest and, we think, more interesting.”
Twenty-two students are exhibiting across painting, photography, ceramics, textiles and digital work. The process material has changed how visitors move through the corridor — slower, and with more pointing.
Younger students keep stopping at the failure walls. That was the whole hope: you see the six bad versions and suddenly the good one seems reachable.
Ines Duarte, art society president
Visitor favourites
An informal sticker vote in the first week put a ceramics series — five bowls documenting five months of learning to throw — narrowly ahead of a photographic diptych of the same window in summer and winter. The torn first attempt, exhibited beside its successful successor, has accumulated a sticker following of its own.
The exhibition runs through the end of the month during school hours, with an evening opening for families next Thursday. Works marked for sale benefit the art society’s materials fund.
The argument behind the theme
The society debated the theme for a month before committing, Duarte said, because showing unfinished work asks real vulnerability of exhibitors — several students initially declined, then joined after seeing others’ process walls. One painter contributed her drafts on the condition that they hang unlabelled, an anonymity the society extended to anyone who wanted it; three exhibitors took it. “The finished pieces have names,” Duarte said. “The struggle can be communal property.”
The exhibition’s guest book — relabelled “the margin” for the occasion — invites visitors to leave their own unfinished thing: an abandoned hobby, a half-learned skill, a project stalled at ninety percent. It is filling faster than any guest book the society can remember, and the entries, Duarte said, may become material for next year’s theme.
