Desmond Brett

I was born in Ipswich and attended St. Joseph’s College from 1984 to 1991. I was fortunate to have Ted Gentry as my Art teacher throughout my time at St. Joseph’s. Ted was in many ways a radical educator who encouraged creativity whilst dispatching fair and honest critique when necessary. He would be able to see though the shallow pastiche of much student work but rewarded students willing to experiment, think laterally and graft. He was self-deprecating of his own paintings and would invite pupils to critique his work – which seems extraordinary now, but in fact by challenging us to interrogate his work we were learning to build critical skills ourselves. Ted amassed a library of new books that we were encouraged to flick through even though they were bewildering and unreadable. Yet these were books about current British and European art, what were to become YBA’s, new trends I contemporary practice and the great American painters like Cy Twombly and de Kooning. The art room was a form of ‘atelier’ whereby anyone could come in an work during free periods or after school, make coffee and get down to work. He showed us trust and that felt tremendously empowering.

A measure of Ted’s determination to expose us to wider art experiences, he once borrowed the school minibus and drove us to the Sainsbury Centre to catch 45 minutes of an exhibition between other lessons. The travelling took far longer than seeing the exhibition but the important thing was for us to see work from first hand.

After my foundation course at what is now Suffolk New College and failing to get in to any Fine Art degree courses whatsoever, I tore my portfolio up and spent the entire year working on building a new portfolio of work and employed some of the questions fostered in Ted’s lessons to develop a body of work that won me a place at The Slade School of Art in 1993. Upon completing my BA (Hons) in Fine Art – gaining a first class degree - I continued on to the MFA in Sculpture finally graduating from the Slade in 1999.

My career as an artist has been augmented by a career as a teacher and lecturer. My first ‘break’ came getting a job teaching A-Level art at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge and after seven years learning how to teach I became Programme Leader in BA (Hons) Fine Art at Hull School of Art which was an incredible experience. The leap from sixth form to teaching undergraduates, managing staff, budgets, recruiting students and awarding degrees was a massive learning experience (I am always learning!). After Hull I was a lecturer at York St. John University and then in 2016 I moved to Norwich University of the Arts where I currently work as a Senior lecturer in Fine Art and I am also Subject Leader in MA Fine Art.

I live in Norwich and have a studio with Outpost and my current sculptural practice is engaged with the possibilities of clay as a material to model large sculptural forms that are going to be cast in paper or fibreglass. I’m preoccupied with attempting to make sculpture that is hand formed and resistant to immediate association with the quotidian. I’m also currently studying for a PhD in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, my project title is ‘Sculpting in Time: Materiality as Continuum’.

My career as an artist owes a great deal to Ted Gentry (who I have always wanted to credit in writing somewhere) and my time at St. Joseph’s. I was encouraged to be creative, supported in my creativity and above all, challenged.

Epilogue

I would also extend gratitude to the wonderful, Mike Davey who I have been thinking a lot about since being invited to contribute to this online exhibition. We shared a love of Neil Young and Mike had one of my sculptures leaning against the wall of his classroom for years. He was unreservedly encouraging of any students willing to break orthodox attitudes or to make some anti-establishment gesture. He relished anything that was problematic or against the grain with infectious glee!