Developments at Bristol
In Bristol, the new possibilities offered within a city (as compared to the rural surroundings of Dartington), obviously provided an exciting new challenge, both in terms of public work and the close links it gave us to professional groups and individual artists working in our field. (An active link to 'Vizability', a community art collective, was especially fruitful). Under Nick Lowe (a performance artist working with video and photography, who had recently done innovative work with people in prison), the group/ community project element in the Second Year developed and expanded, taking advantage of the wide range of schools and other community organisations available. Through these projects, through third year residencies and through work experience placements, we were able rapidly to build up a very wide network of contacts in Bristol and beyond, which included the City Council, the main cultural centres, such as the Watershed and Arnolfini Gallery, Sustrans (the national cycle path organisation), the city markets, and a host of other official and unofficial bodies.

Students flowed out from the Faculty in what became a series of seasonal migrations. Second Years set out on group/ public projects around the city in the autumn, then further afield for work experience in early summer. Spring into summer saw the Third Years flow out to their separate residencies around the city and immediate region. Summer saw the First Years in groups creating site-specific works around the campus. At other times work proceeded in the studio.

Given the close proximity of the existing course in Fine Art, we felt the need from the outset to make the revived Art and Social Context as different to Fine Art as possible. Our students began to make extensive use of photography, video, performance, and installation (as distinct from the more traditional media then favoured by the Fine Art students). The burgeoning of new electronic technologies in the 90s also opened up digital imagery as a medium and the internet as a potential context within which students might work. To further distinguish the work emerging from Art and Social Context, the residency was extended, (initially) to include the whole of the third year, thus ensuring that the final work of our students was quite different in aim and character from the primarily studio-based work in Fine Art. But there were also many overlaps between the two subject areas, and increasingly as time went on, staff from both subject areas contributed across the board and students from the two shared studios with resulting cross fertilisation of ideas and practices. In 1999 a common First Year was introduced, thus consolidating moves towards this relationship within difference. In the mid 90s, Art and Social Context changed its name to 'Fine Art in Context' to locate it clearly within what became known as the 'Fine Arts Field'. (The undergraduate course, now entering its 25th year of operation, still continues today, now under the slightly modified title, 'Fine Art and Context').

For the undergraduate programme, our work in the first ten years at Bristol divided roughly into three periods: 1) an initial period, which one might call curriculum and staff driven, in which we put much staff effort into structuring and supporting the group and public dimensions of the work. 2) a middle period, which was more student driven, in which we loosened some of the requirements for group and public work in order to encourage more variety of approach and allow each student more artistic room for manouvre. (This period was in fact marked by a raising of artistic and technical standards). 3) a later period, in which we sought a much greater degree of integration between what were by then three Fine Art based courses. It is no coincidence that these developments also paralleled a steadily falling staff provision in relation to an increasing number of students. Although each of the above stages had its educational rationale, each also afforded economies in staffing. Such moves were reflected across the board in Higher Education at the time.

It is hard to characterise the student residencies in Bristol with just a few examples, since they were all so diverse and so particular to each student's interests. One student chose a residency at what had once been a complex of large orphanages, contacting and interviewing elderly people who had grown up there. She then introduced into one of the buildings small assemblages that commemorated particular childhood incidents (each located in the place the incident had occurred). Another student, through an exploration of personal ads in a local paper and subsequent contacts made, set up a performance in the back room of a pub where she enacted a rendezvous with (invited) individual viewers. Another, again, worked with a small group of schoolgirls to build a shelter, a small but exotic folly in a local park. These were not untypical of Third Year work, which always connected out beyond the confines of art or art education into some aspect of ordinary life in local communities.

As time went on (starting in 1997), we were able to add to the provision of courses an M.A. in Fine Art in Context, thus allowing a more questioning and professional level of work than had been possible at undergraduate level. For those of us who had taught on the undergraduate programme for some years, this was a welcome step forward in sophistication and an opportunity to deploy some of our own research interests in support. The MA also brought the whole staff team and students together in discussions of some of the historical and philosophical roots of our work. Following the establishment of the MA, a research centre was created, in Contextual, Public and Commemorative Art, which was intended to formalise links between the activities of the various staff pursuing these themes in their research and professional practice. Jane Calow was brought in to coordinate this research which (as the title suggests) ranged widely, e.g. from contextually oriented performance and inter-arts work to historical and cultural research, and work related to places (as we perceive and experience them or record how they change).

During the 90s there had been a proliferation of similar undergraduate and post graduate courses to our own in universities and colleges elsewhere in Britain (12). Also, certain educational institutions in other European countries were following similar lines. We had made working links through students, ex-students and staff with a number of these, notably in France, Luxembourg, and in Germany, where the Hochskul de Kunst in Berlin adopted the title 'Kunst und Context' for one of its ongoing postgraduate programmes. But in the UK itself, wider changes in public arts policy and provision were occurring that would entirely change the climate in which we had been operating.