Edinburgh is a city filled with exciting creative opportunities and already this year students have shown great imagination and willing. From organising the fashion show to setting up small businesses, students continue to inspire their peers with their great entrepreneurial flare.
A most notable example is Rail, a gallery and pop up shop on South College Street run by three students at the university. Their intention is to make ‘the context of the creative process tangible for the customer’, something that is felt just by walking through its doors.
In this competitive world filled with pressure and hardship, having courage is vital. This is important for both success and failure. Succeeding with courage is satisfying and rewarding but failing with courage is a noble way of learning from one’s mistakes.
For the 12 artists partaking in the exhibition Creativity Takes Courage, being bold is a means of exploring ones comfort zone in an artistic manner. The result is a spectacular creative achievement. An exciting combination of painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, the show seeks to create a platform for emerging talent and raise awareness for Maggie’s Cancer Care.
Bringing together students from Edinburgh College of Art and The University of Edinburgh, the exhibition is a tremendous celebration of the recent link between the two institutions.
Both Scottish and international, they share one common similarity; they are all highly creative and courageous individuals. For aspiring illustrator Sara Ljeskovac, courageousness is “an appeal to be bold… do what you love and ignore any shred of self-doubt” because “without courage, nothing can be achieved in art”.
Fine Art and History of Art student Robert Cooper, primarily a sculptor, says, “I am using the exhibition as an opportunity to exhibit a different aspect of my creativity”. For all of the artists, exploiting this ‘different aspect’ has meant using new mediums or scales, which they hadn’t previously worked in, while others have chosen to explore personal subject matters.
The name of the exhibition not only reflects the art that will permeate its walls but also ties in with the charity which it will be supporting, Maggie’s. The creativity of the architects who design the centres and the courage of their visitors is what make the charity so inspiring. Their centre in Edinburgh was the very first one to be built and today, 18 years later, Maggie’s have 15 with many more in development.
Creativity Takes Courage is both a platform for these 12 artists and also a plea for boldness. It hopes to inspire its visitors to try something new without the fear of failure. After all, failing with the knowledge that one has sought to be bold is not failure at all. It is courage.
