Fine Art student celebrates graduation by making crocheted caricatures of course tutors

A Fine Art student from Ipswich has celebrated her graduation in style – by immortalising her course tutors and technicians with special crocheted caricatures.

Gemma Upson had exhibited a striking final-year work at the Arts Degree Show in the summer, featuring 30 crocheted album covers, all created freehand with no pattern, displayed in one of the gallery’s central avenues.

Each album represented an important part of the soundtrack to her life, with albums including The Bends by Radiohead, Ten by Pearl Jam, and Velvet Revolver’s Contraband.

Viewers were encouraged to leave their comments in a book beside the exhibited work, entitled Autoethnography: Cover of Colours, sharing their memories of the records through their own lives.

Now, to celebrate the course tutors and technicians who helped her across the three-year degree, Gemma has crocheted caricatures of each of them, coming together for photos with the team and their crafted alter egos at her ceremony on Tuesday morning.

Gemma, who first picked up crocheting at primary school, created some of the team caricatures between her first and second year, and completed the rest over the summer after she finished the course.

“I had returned from the summer break in second year and made a caricature of each of them because I had enjoyed the first year so much, I just wanted to celebrate them because they are all amazing characters,” Gemma said.

“By the time of the installation for the Arts Degree Show in June, I was working more with the technicians, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out, just as a thank you to the whole team for being so cool. No amount of time is too much for them to give – if you have any questions or problems they are there.”

Gemma started utilising her gift for crochet in her course work during a module called Evocative Objects, where she crocheted a picture of Caister lifeboat – an image which took her back to childhood holidays with her family at the Norfolk coastal village.

“I started just looking at a photograph, and a bit like how a printer works I could approach it line by line,” Gemma said.

“You spend half the time from the front, but half the time back-to-front because you have to turn the work. Normally you would encase the back within stitches, but I was so busy trying to reproduce the work I didn’t even think about it, and I somehow invented my own unusual way of working. I fell in love with the idea of displaying both sides.”

That led to Gemma creating the Autoethnography album covers for her final year, deliberately leaving the backs unstitched to give them a unique ‘B-side’ that made audiences interact with the work.

Gemma added: “I loved people watching. When they walked past the backs, I kept seeing people, they would walk, do a double take, take steps back and walk around the work. I loved that interaction, watching people smile and talk about the albums.”

The 45-year-old is no stranger to making caricatures. Previously she has crocheted famous figures such as Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Grohl, David Bowie and the former Top Gear trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.

A caricature she created of Radio X presenter Chris Moyles resulted in the DJ sharing her work on air, netting Gemma thousands of new followers for her artwork Instagram page almost overnight.

Reflecting on her three years on the course, Gemma concluded: “It has gone so fast, but it’s hand-on-heart one of the best things I have ever done. I knew we would experiment with different mediums, and I knew we would learn a lot about art history, but it’s also a period where you learn a lot about yourself, and all the tutorials we have are so insightful – you gain so much from the time you are with these tutors.”

To find out more about Gemma’s work, visit her Instagram page @gemwithallmyart here.

To find out more about studying Fine Art at the University of Suffolk, head to the course page here.