The Glasgow School of Art Postgraduate Degree Shows run across four locations in the city. The Stow Building hosts Contemporary Art Practice, Art Writing, Curatorial Practice, and PhD from 29th August to 3rd September, showcasing a 12-month studio-based postgraduate programme offering three disciplinary pathways: Painting, Drawing, Print Media; Photography, the Moving Image; and Sculpture and Performance. The programme encourages students to research and practise within and across their specialisms, and to collaborate across pathways and programmes. Grounded in Scotland, it attracts a diverse national and international student community, contributing to Glasgow’s contemporary art scene.
Martin Newth, Head of the GSA School of Fine Art, says, ‘We’d like to think we’re contributing to the cultural ecosystem in Glasgow.’ For him, this exhibition represents what they are trying to do: ‘To be incredibly, intimately involved in the surroundings in Glasgow but also very, very internationally dynamic.’
One of the things he was particularly interested in the show was, ‘…how it represents all kinds of use of different materials, methods and processes. It is a very strong presence of materially involved work. We also have students fully engaged in new technology from AI and digital possibilities, stretching the boundaries of those. What’s interesting is how they operate next to each other. There’s a dialogue going on between these students making work in different processes and practices, being very involved in what they are doing but also thinking how they work and rub up against all sorts of other practices.’
Photographer Robin Currie told me that he developed an interest in welding during his postgraduate studies. There’s a darkly humorous anxiety at the core of this work, which Currie explains using an allegory quoted by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. Currie explores this through sculpture, metalwork, and experimental casting.
He depicts the horrors of the corporate world, and the loss of identity within the monotony of office life, with unsettling sculptural forms like an upside-down office-worker with no head, a couple of legs hanging down from a wall, a pile of middle-class brand tags, and a broken, crooked office drawer. His centrepiece, Performance Review, is an office chair welded together with steel spikes and handcuffs.
Scott Climie’s work is also inspired by anxiety. This time more personal, but shared with a lot of people: body dysmorphia, contamination, cleanliness and illness. The moment I stepped into the room of Scott Climie’s artworks, I felt a childish ease-of-being in a well-structured setting. His use of geometry creates the feeling that nothing is left incomplete, and his bold colours give a sense of clear boundaries. In what kind of an environment would we be anxiety-free? All measures are taken, well-controlled and sterilised. With the 3-dimensional, brightly coloured spaces, Scott is creating those environments that are ‘void of any temporary living elements.’
He also wanted the joyful colours to reflect a longing for a time of life before anxieties emerged – ‘far simpler and more optimistic’. His choice of durable materials like acrylic and aluminium also contributes to the idea of immortalising those anxiety-free days.
An artist from Taiwan, Ji’s practice poses a fundamental question: when colour gradually fades from our everyday lives, what will remain?
From afar, the canvases look empty; as you come closer, images gradually reveal themselves. His subtle colours keep the viewer somewhere in-between absence and presence. His central artwork seems to ripple across its surface – it’s made of long strips stapled together. To create a natural ripple, he made dashed lines with Play-Doh instead of paint. On closer inspection, you can see the colour isn’t on the surface but on the back of the fabric he used. With this technique, he creates an illusion of colour – his hypnotic pastel hues are actually neon yellows, blues, and purples.
Qianquan Wang’s interactive project, Smart Zoo, is hard to miss, with its playful, colourful mixed-media sculptures. She uses repurposed household objects, from an old coffee machine to a computer keyboard. Using a low-cost DIY process, she gives the characters spiked, colourful hair, fake eyelashes, and neon colours, resembling young people of the Shamate culture in China. She uses ‘Smart’ for its phonetic similarity of this Chinese word, not as an aesthetically equivalent term. In her Smart Zoo, the animals are displayed as if being observed in a circular setting, but their exaggerated eyes and different orientations also suggest they are looking back at the viewer.
Devanath comes from a fishing family in Kannur – a coastal city in Kerala, India. His installation carries traces of his family’s fishing traditions and coastal life, and his work on longing also tells a story of carrying home in one’s heart. He aimed to bring the characteristics of the seascape into his work, through shape and materiality. The material of the large centrepiece, resembling a ship’s hull, was treated with salt water to create a natural weathered surface and bring out the feeling and atmosphere of a coastal landscape. In contrast, he uses polished steel to form waves, screwed onto the walls. Focusing on the constant change of coastal topography, he uses the tension between what remains physically, and what lives in memory.
(For blessings) is a gilded, eight-eyed ceramic seal-chimera who holds a prayer bell and sits in a metal basin full of water, inviting the viewer to pour water over itself. They have placed some special objects like milk teeth, seal bones, and their children’s umbilical cord stumps in the body of work.
In their installation temple, Maya explores a contemporary queer animist practice through sculpture, sound, movement and writing. Their work brings to the surface the artificial distinction between human and non-human, and reminds the viewer that this is itself a politically-driven perception. This brings about the colonialist idea of forming relationships based on hierarchy, ownership, and control. They remind us there are more sustainable ways to exist, through sculpture, sound, movement and writing. Their use of varied materials reflects their awareness of Western ideology of purity and separation.
A photographer and ferry captain from the Isle of Skye, Isabelle Law invites the viewer to take a closer look at one of Scotland’s most tourist-y spots. Beyond the tourist attractions, she puts the people and communities who actually live and work there centre-stage. She seeks not only a connection with people, but also with the land. She used salt made from seawater collected from Skye to print the photographs she has taken over the last five years.
Created using the cyanotype process, MAPPED LIVES overlays photographic portraits onto a map of the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. The blue-toned prints merge people and place, suggesting that identity is shaped by landscape, community, and memory as much as by geography.
Her drawings evoke vulnerability and fragility, with its subtle lines and colours. And Out Pours the Yolk is an image of an egg yolk pouring. With yellow-to-orange hues and well-depicted fluidity and viscosity, it catches the attention only to reveal that what appears to be leaking from an eggshell is actually a rock growing daisies. She ‘explores the catharsis of the realisation that all things are vulnerable, including the seemingly strong and powerful.’
Owen Speir’s mixed-media piece Illegible Body combines striking plaster and soap casts, handmade paper text drawings drawn from a found Hamlet tape, and looping cassette works using distorted analogue audio and an archival recording of Owen singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow as a teenager.
One of the most powerful artworks, it is subtle, often blending into the room through its materiality, use of translucent materials in places, natural colours, and its positioning within the space. The sculptural works hug wall corners, lie on the wooden floor, and hide into a radiator. Owen’s work primarily involves repetitive, cyclical processes. The sound from a looping cassette enters into dialogue with this repetition, the cassettes and the player itself becoming part of the installation. Owen’s concerns include the perception of time and the nature of transformation itself: ‘Through repetition, decay and disintegration, the work reflects on the prolonged waiting and suspended temporality experienced within transgender healthcare in the UK.’
Ma Yao is raising the voice of the invisible. As a child who grew up in coal-rich Shanxi Province in China, and her art begins with the faces of miners engraved in her early memories. She extends her concerns to a global question: ‘Why are certain people and things considered worthy of attention, while others are naturally placed at the margins?’
In her paintings, she layers colour to depict the tired faces of the miners at the end of a workday, while black dust discolours their faces, making their eyes appear especially bright.
From the Art Writing course, Lucille Mona Ling’s work is a translation of a written text into a physical form. Her multidisciplinary installation comprises four ceramic sculptures on wooden plinths, arranged across a moss-covered floor. The fifth sculpture is a ceramic book that holds a hand-stitched edition of the accompanying text.
Studying Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art), Maggie Ashmole’s project is an online map of exhibitions in Edinburgh and an exhibition listings website. Edinburgh Art Map (EAM) is built on the existing model of Glasgow Art Map and was created in collaboration with EMBASSY Gallery. This project aims to connect artists and spaces with new audiences. There’s also a plan to produce a biannual printed map of permanent galleries, to be distributed across the city. EMBASSY Gallery is hosting a launch party on 6th September between 4-6 pm (Instagram: @edinburgh_art_map)
This is just a glimpse of the many remarkable artworks in the exhibition. The exhibition continues until 3rd September and will remain accessible online thereafter.
Thank you to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for this review.
