Student show with a difference

Approaches coalesce in data, behaviour and ecology

SARAH URWIN JONES

WHILE art schools echo to the sounds of last-minute panic as final-year students put the finishing touches to their degree show installations, Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery mounts its own take on the student show, rigorously curated from the current talent enrolled at the university’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

“We took various approaches to finding the final students to work with,” says assistant curator James Clegg, speaking to me by phone as the Trading Zone exhibition is installed around him. There are 21 students in this newly reformatted show, representing 16 projects. It is a neatly curated segue from the vast and varied display of work on show at Edinburgh College of Art up the road.

“We’re aware of the correspondence between the two exhibitions and the overlap in time,” says Clegg. “But I think the difference is that ours is about experimentation and is free from some of the constraints that come with presenting work for assessment. And we’ve worked very hard to mentor the students and make sure there is the budget there for them to present work that is very ambitious.

“We reached out across the whole of Edinburgh College of Art to bring together different disciplines. We asked members of staff which students were making interesting work, we had one-to-one meetings with students, we went round open studios, we put out an open call across the college. I think in all we engaged with the work of over 300 students, incorporating as many fields as we could, from archaeology and business to music and architecture. We started to develop a much better knowledge of individual practices and works and whittled it down to a shortlist of students we felt we could work with. What really piqued our interest, obviously, was when students presented us with something we’d never seen before.”

The students themselves range from a second-year undergraduate to Masters and PhD students – there are quite a few of the latter as they are so well-established in their practice and ideas, a key part of Talbot Rice’s focus. The exhibition itself revolves around “approaches to the contemporary world” that coalesce in three key areas: data, behaviour and ecology.

There are some fascinating prospects. Doug McCausland, an MSc student in digital composition and performance, will exhibit Glossolalia, a sound installation derived from his discovery of far-right and conservative broadcasting in his native United States, filled with “misogynistic speech, denigration of basic human rights, anti-immigrant standards, racial hate, arguments in favour of nuclear strikes on the Middle East, the comfort of mutually assured destruction and a holy man proclaiming the president-elect as the true God-given beacon of hope to lead mankind into the rapturous end-times”. His installation will echo around the space, accompanied at times by live performance.

There is work that is extracted from the digital world, taken from realworld statistics, passed through the digital realm and remodelled as exhibit. Clegg points to architecture and fine art PhD students Asad Khan and Eleni-Ira Panourgia who have used LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scans to create displaced animations of the post-catastrophic landscape in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Panourgia’s cello soundscape animates the digital images.

Ella Yolande, a third-year intermedia student, will explore origins and creation myths in a video installation that pits oil and its trappings against the slimy substances

graduates showing here in all disciplines, from design to architecture, fine art and textiles, illustration, animation and jewellery, among many other specialisms.

They include Minrui Jiao, a product design graduate who has designed a wooden Isofix car seat for dogs that allows them to move while being relatively restrained. Art and