CRITIC’S CHOICE

Finding your way around a degree show in any normal year is discombobulating enough – and that’s before you get to the myriad concepts and aesthetics on display in the final year installations themselves – but when the builders are in, as they are at Edinburgh College of Art, it starts to become a little Kafkaesque.

This year’s Fine Art degree show – elsewhere do not miss the Architecture, Design or the Applied Arts degree shows in this final weekend – is the usual ever-expanding platform of disciplines, from the age-old Drawing, Painting and Sculpture to the nebulous Intermedia, although on this showing of cross-disciplinary work, you could be forgiven for thinking it is all intermedia now.

This year’s show is something of a mixed bag, with some excellent work alongside a number of perhaps muddied concepts, tableaux and mini-worlds, as well as a certain homogeneity of aesthetic in places, sometimes masking the thinking going on behind the work.

I liked Jack Handscombe’s (Fine Art MA) gothic sandcastles, large-scale neo-gothic turrets looming out of a tower of sand, and his play on Blake, Newton and Paolozzi – a figure in full racing driver kit hunched over a laptop, with a forest of bamboo sprouting out of his back, as if he had been there for a very long time. Taylor Shaw’s (Sculpture BA) video of someone karate-kicking a block of clay into shape brought a welcome laugh. Katherine Russell’s (Sculpture BA) un-functional functional ceramics, left, were also well done. And amongst all the miniature world scenarios, Jessica Gasson’s (MAFA Fine Art) was the most polished, an atmospheric dark room archive of cast moths and fragile fragments, displayed in museum cases, with bat flight patterns engraved, white on black, in panels in the darkened room next door.

Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show: Fine Art, Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, 0131 651 5800, eca.ed.ac.uk. Sat and Sun, 11am-5pm