The Herald
The tears and the triumphs The art students of Glasgow and Edinburgh are now staging their degree shows, but what can we expect? Moira Jeffrey reports
One of the first works you see at Glasgow School of Art degree show this year is a video called Match by Eunhee Choi and Harriet Wills in which the pair undergo a series of head-to-head competitions.
You can’t help but feel that for many graduating students the degree show must be like balancing that brick: requiring an ability to remain level-headed under academic pressure and public scrutiny. It can stir even a critic’s hardened conscience to catch sight of the tears and triumphs on results day. Graduation is the first, but not the definitive, test of these young artists. Much depends on their desire and their ability to keep working through the uncertainty and economic stringency of the next few years.
Happily, though, there is much to celebrate at Glasgow, although it doesn’t quite feel like the school’s strongest-ever year. The textiles department has produced a handful of confident new designers, including Anthony Campbell, whose streetwise prints combining gilt and graffiti are instantly wearable and have received a number of prizes. James Miller’s beautiful printed silks also shine.
Louise Gray has produced some excellent embroidery combining folk art techniques with neon colours, perfect for the urban peasant aspirations of the modern bohemian. In jewellery, Rona McKee’s floral pieces may use familiar imagery, but their craftsmanship is consummate.
In painting, there is a deliberately downbeat feel. Lucy Stein’s large grungy paintings have won her the Armour travel bursary. Andrew Margolies-Mezvinsky has produced an enormous sprawling show of fascinating works, using found fabrics, brutal stitching and a grim carnival parade of cruelty and folly. Trine Kristensen’s throbbing, symbolic landscapes with purple skies and odd windblown landscapes are strong, with her smaller more improvised pieces having a magic that is missing in her show-stoppers. William Ross Hall has accomplished the difficult feat of producing intricate decorative paintings on strips of vinyl tape in a show that pays tribute to the influence of Jim Lambie.
In photography, Louise Clare Rowley has produced an installation that is a scrupulous explanation of her working methods in a project that fuses ideas of genetic engineering and robotics. Katrine Kristensen Bjerregard has photographed fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. The moody set-ups and apparent conflicts in the images can’t disguise the almost hilarious likenesses between the generations, as though any pretence of distance is a farce.
In sculpture, the body is everywhere. Billy Teasdale’s confident installation is full of lurid bodily references. Alison Dunlop’s delicate thread sculpture in red and blue guides you tentatively through her space. Lucy Christian’s video sees the artist bouncing around with a pair of shiny pink balloons strapped to her breasts.
Over at Tramway, the MFA show, featuring postgraduates from the prestigious two-year course, has a more curated and consistent feel this year and, with an excellent catalogue, it is more exhibition than degree show. Upstairs, Audhild Dahlstrom has woven a nightmarish urban fable in a video that quotes liberally from film noir and horror, but has a distinctive melancholic atmosphere all of its own.
Hideko Inoue has created a sequence of photo-realist paintings, all based on photographs of her grandfather. It’s not her technique that captivates so much as the touching imagery and the inclusion of a table of objects, linked to the pictures that include the kind of tweed ties and knitted caps her grandfather wears.
Karla Black, whose recent shows in venues like Transmission Gallery have included work from almost non-existent materials like vaseline, has produced a series of interesting and muscular paintings on cardboard and curled carpet, that fold and crack under their own weight, but never quite collapse. That metaphorical brick, thank goodness, is still in place.
Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, from tomorrow until June 26; Hiscox MFA is at Tramway until June 27.