Amanda Beech

"Goldsmiths presented an atmosphere where making art was coupled with thinking about art in a critical context, and its reputation for cultivating this type of 'thinking practice' through seminars and discussion was central to how I saw my work developing at that time. To me, Goldsmiths represented a place where an artist could have an 'active', 'engaged' and 'affective' practice rather than offering a passive attitude to arts' potential political power. The programme was intensive and challenging. It allowed me to work through the question of how an artwork could sustain a vital and generative critique in and beyond its own context. Unlike other programmes, Goldsmiths was more focused on enabling the student to make those difficult decisions about practice and to test them out in focused seminars on practice. The programme enabled me to develop a method of working in my practice, where theory and practice were not combative; nor were they illustrative of each other. This led to the development of an area of practice that I had previously not considered as an artist, that of publishing writing and public speaking. This led to my undertaking a practice-based PhD. Goldsmiths foregrounded the relevance of key skills in approaching practice from different perspectives, as well as the importance of understanding the core motivations of the work that I wanted to make. Leaving an MA with an idea of what I wanted to say as an artist, and how my practice could be developed independently by producing my own discursive contexts for art production were lasting benefits of the programme."