Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2011

This article was first published in The Skinny on 24 June 2011. For images, go to The Skinny.

Perusing the offerings of tomorrow’s art stars is always overwhelming. We make our annual pilgrimage to the Central Belt degree shows, hoping to emerge with some senses intact 

It’s Degree Show time again at Glasgow School of Art. Students showcase the fruits of four years’ hard slog, and we get to see who has cracked under the pressure, abandoning their masterpiece at the last moment to caper about “The Mack” building with a chicken on their head.

It must be tempting, after being chivvied along from one project to another, to display every work you’ve ever made. But as the poor besieged viewer knows, less is most definitely more. Better to go for one roomy old wardrobe and fit it out with a section of church pew and an audio recording of familial confidences, as Amy Dolan has done. With the chastening reek of zealously polished church wood, her discreet confessional is cathartic after you’ve been party to Euan Ogilvie’s DIY dead mouse slicing contraption. On opening night a small unwholesome crowd amassed in the basement to cheer as each turn of the wheel brought a mouse nearer the blade.

Strange pleasures are similarly afoot in Silja Strøm’s miniature collage-style paintings. Not unwholesome but otherworldly, the scenarios depicted feature anthropomorphic beings and creatures engaged in curious situations. Polar bears and a beach ball-like swirl are recurrent motifs, convincing us of a whole world beyond the page – a nod to Scottish-born artist Charles Avery’s project The Islanders, which charts a fictional universe so extensive it requires an encyclopaedic guide.

Just as Strøm’s works are notable for their compactness and precision, so several photographers stand out for having method among the madness. Mounting photographs of varying sizes and subjects in a scattered arrangement with a nearby sculpture and a TV monitor has become something of a house style for GSA photography.

Going against the grain, Thomas Hatton’s photographs are pleasing for their order. The black and white series exploring the topography of Egypt and Morocco feature dark rock formations and whited-out landscapes, the result of sandstorms. This interesting study of contrast reflects on the medium of photography as well as on the subject matter.

Meanwhile, Simone Kubik has deliberately employed a whiteout effect in her arresting images. In a series of headshots against a white background, faces gaze directly at the camera. Intensity of gaze and the edge of a t-shirt neckline are all we have to characterise the individuals.

Some sculpture is also striking in its simplicity, such as Emily Ilett’s projection onto a plaster sphere suspended at head height. The projected image shows a woman standing on a shoreline wearing on her head the self-same plaster sphere, while an audio recording supplies the sound of the wind. Similarly subtle are Michelle Roberts’ explorations into the material properties of wax and etching ink: slabs of wax taken for supple canvases bend gently against the wall.

In Fabien Marques’ photographs the opulent interiors of a German brothel lay empty, our attention on their richly detailed furnishings rather than the deeds that take place there. Juxtaposed with this are images of the Basilica at Lourdes. The devil being in the details, here it is not the architecture but the crowds of pilgrims who offer a ripe opportunity for a study of human nature.

There are some less-polished works that nevertheless make an impact. Beth Hughes’ office installation is particularly hard to put your finger on. With hand-printed wallpaper patterned with hotels and palm trees, an abandoned Hoover, showers of glitter and a plug-in air freshener, it is carefully considered and yet unconvincing. Who may inhabit it and why remain unknowns, but after the abundance of affirmations, questions and uncertainty are quite refreshing.

 

With writing in mind

Richard Taylor from a-n.co.uk interviewed me for a-n’s Students section about my reviewing process and approach to writing about hefty Degree Shows.

http://www.a-n.co.uk/students/article/1268996

Glasgow School of Art Undergraduate Degree Show 2010

This year saw a continuation of the Painting & Printmaking and the Photography departments’ inclinations towards cross-disciplinary and 3-D work; perhaps the strongest examples of this trend for the past few years.  Where sometimes, these have taken the form of carefully arranged installations of “chaos” that absurdly insist on frontal orientation and feel contrived, this year steered clear of ostentation and showed persuasive, sophisticated uses of mixed media, most notably among the Photographers.

Lale Arikoglu’s installation combined found images and footage with her own photographs; framed work with loose sheets and Post-its; tiny, meticulous ink drawings of natural forms with handwritten and printed matter; and elements that could have been works in their own right with ones that, removed from the installation, might simply have been research.  Modes of doubling, recurrence of subjects and materials, and cross-referencing across the body of works tied them all together with a delicate balance that commanded the viewer’s scrutiny a second time, in a manner reminiscent of the Icelandic conceptual artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson.

In a similar vein, Lisa-Marie Reynolds’ work on negative body image combined drawings, ceramic body casts, and other text works in a skilful, coherent way that allowed her to incorporate very slight, lo-fi pieces without them paling into insignificance, such as a wall-mounted, finger-sized piece of glass with a crack in it, bearing the label ‘No fingertips.’

Another photographer, Thomas Horák, ventured further into the 3-D realm, with a great assortment of objects including motorised ferrets, end-to-end pint glasses containing confetti, bunches of nails soldered together, a film playing on a TV monitor, and an electric motor which provided a constant hum.  With an almost too numerous and wide-ranging collection of scientific and domestic items, and small motorised furry things flying around, it had the feel of an interactive science museum, but without the interactive element.  Inspection of the list of titles proved enlightening, but also limited some of the works to one-liners.

Horák did, however, negotiate his awkward corner space by leaving a circle of the floor unpainted and arranging his works around it.  As ever, appraising the show meant having one’s judgement coloured by how well the artists had managed the lack of space, before one even began to assess the work.

This being so, one might expect the large-scale sculptures to be at a particular disadvantage, and indeed they were.  Susanna Olczak, Naomi Bell, and Tim Pulleyn were three who showed impressive execution and attention to finish in their formalist structures, but clearly could have benefited from a little extra space.  In the Mackintosh Gallery, Bell’s sleek black lines referenced the architecture of the building, and also literally reflected it in the Perspex sheets on the floor; thus, although the viewer may not have been able to step back to apprehend the piece fully, her mental image was filled in by peering directly over the base to see the reflection of wooden beams looming overhead.

Lyndsey Wardrop’s wall intervention showed a lovely, sensitive engagement with the fabric of the building: blue-grey metal slats had been inserted into the wall like an oversized air vent, and the crumbling, imperfect texture of the surround resonated with that of, well, the artschool.

As with the sculpture, the most interesting of the Painting and Printmaking works had gone for big and bold, and were a welcome antidote to the dense, involved, studies of gothic subjects that seem to be recycled year after year.  Shaun O’Donnell’s twisted, fleshy humanoid lumps stood out vividly against surreal, brightly coloured wastelands, although some of the most interesting of these, depicting the fleshy forms interfacing with foreign objects, were stacked to one side on the floor.  Solveig Settemsdal’s works similarly stood out for their bold, luscious, impressionistic style.

In a different strain entirely, Tilde Engstrøm’s brilliant existentialist portraits of faintly absurd characters seemed at first glance to belong in the realm of witty caricatures in a Sunday paper supplement.  In fact, they covered conceptual as well as aesthetic bases, the texts and quotes accompanying the drawings designed to manipulate a predictable response in the viewers, and to purposefully distance them from the subjects so they remain “consciously critical observers.”

Two works that rendered this impossible were Paul McDonald’s affecting but humorous exploration of living with disabilities associated with thalidomide, and Gitte Hansen’s absorbing photographs, which deservedly won the Alice Duncan prize.  After watching Hansen’s film of two young goats head butting each other for longer than I care to admit, I concluded that the better new work by this year’s graduates was definitely to be found among the Photography department.

The Degree Show runs from 12 June – 19 June 2010.