Every studio brought its term to the main hall on Friday and stood beside it. Eleven rooms of work in one, from first-year drawings to Portfolio Year pieces, and the whole school walking between them for an afternoon and most of an evening.
The open crit happens at the end of every term. The rule is the same as the weekly critique each studio holds on a Wednesday, only bigger: you stand next to what you made and account for it, in front of everyone who did not make it. Nothing is marked. The hall was still full at seven.
How an open crit works
- On Thursday evening every studio clears a patch of the main hall floor and a length of wall.
- On Friday morning the work goes up, studio by studio, with no labels beyond a name and a year group.
- At two the doors open to the whole school. Lessons stop for the afternoon.
- Every maker stays within reach of their work until five, and anyone can ask them anything.
- At five staff and parents arrive, and the conversations start again from the beginning.
Getting the hall ready
The main hall is a working room for the rest of the term, full of long tables, half-finished sculpture and other people’s coffee. Turning it into a place where eleven studios can show a term’s work takes most of Thursday evening. Tables go against the walls, the sculpture moves to the edges, and each studio chalks out its patch of floor.
There is always an argument about the light. The painting studio wants the north end by the windows; the moving image students want the opposite, and a corner they can black out. This year the print room lent the stages a set of screens, which is exactly the kind of thing the afternoon is for.
What people said
The questions at an open crit are rarely the ones a teacher would ask. A first-year asked a Portfolio Year student why her print was so big. A sixth-former asked the Head whether he ever made anything any more. A group of eleven-year-olds spent twenty minutes in front of a single ceramic bowl, and when they finally left, the student who had made it said it was the best feedback she had had all year.
You spend a term with a piece of work and only the people in your studio see it. Then for one afternoon, three hundred people do, and half of them are younger than you and not at all polite about it. It is the most useful day of the term.
A Portfolio Year student, in the evening
Why nothing is marked
Every term someone new to the school asks why the most public moment in the calendar carries no grade. The answer is that a mark ends a conversation, and the point of the afternoon is to start one. Students who show something unfinished are not penalised for it; they are usually the ones who get the most out of the day.
The crit is also how the studios find out about each other. The print room sees what the stages have been doing. The sound students discover that the ceramicists have been recording their kiln. Several collaborations that ended up in last year’s degree show began with a conversation on this floor.
A mark ends a conversation. The point of the afternoon is to start one.
From the school’s own guide to the open crit
The next one
The summer term closes with its own open crit in July, the week after the degree show comes down. In December the building stays open for an evening for the town, not just for parents, and a good deal of what hangs in the hall on Friday will still be in progress then.
