TALENTED final-year students studying at Southampton Solent’s School of Art, Design and Fashion will present the RATSBIRDSBATS Exhibition from next week.

Each year students are invited to apply for the Graduate Artists in Residence scheme, which culminates in an exhibition at the University’s gallery, Solent Showcase.

The exhibition, which runs from Friday, September, 4 to Saturday, October, 10, is funded and supported by the University’s School of Art, Design and Fashion.

The award provides graduates with the time, money and space to make and exhibit new work over the summer. Each artist receives £500 to cover the cost of materials, free use of the University’s fully equipped large studios and support from the Solent Showcase curator.

This year’s residents are; Kristine Erminasa, Jeremie Glaize and Wendy White studied, who studied on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course; Will Whittington from BA (Hons) Illustration and Emma Payne, a recent graduate from BA (Hons) Animation.

The resulting exhibition features Will’s globe-trotting time differences, Emma’s civic bunker and a new view of Southampton by Wendy.

Kristine’s work – which has inspired the show’s title – highlights town and country issues, while Jeremie’s imagery is firmly rooted in the city and its colours.

Will’s work examines how cultural influence has become instant and global. The Impressionist painters in the 1860s loved the packaging that arrived with the goods from Japan, using the visual lessons in their revolutionary painting. Will references these ideas through his use of packing and clocks from cities separated by one hour, London and Oslo, and Bangkok and Hong Kong.

“They show the amount happening all over the planet at any one time, a mass hive of activity that never stops, keeping everything moving all the time.”

Emma’s digital work has been done entirely by hand – pixel by pixel has been placed lovingly in a digital mosaic. “It stirs up a lot of emotions in me – from memories of playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega, to reading The Beano under the bedsheets and laughing at Mike Pearse’s wicked and human comic strips,” she says.

Kristine’s animals, the RATSBIRDSBATS of the show’s title, stand in for human beings. “People can become free, like a bird, by changing their perspective on life,” she says.

Jeremie looks at how colour impacts on human emotions. Looking at recent developments in ultra-violet, he has attempted three dimensional processes to see what happens to colours in space using brightly coloured bottle tops for their purity of colour.

Wendy White has been redefining her attitude to her chosen subject of landscapes. She says, “For my recent series of work I have been walking the outskirts of the city of Southampton where I live, taking photographs and making sketches, then working from this resource material back in the studio to produce what I describe as hybridscapes.”