CRITIC’S CHOICE

IT has been the bane of many a student’s life this last year that their degree shows have had to be seen online, rather than in all the thrilling mayhem and diverse conjunctions of the labyrinthine corridors and studios of the art schools themselves.

And yet there are some positives, not least that there has been a greater emphasis on better presenting work online, so that a student’s work can reach not only an audience, but a wide audience.

Glasgow School of Art’s postgraduate degree show last summer was a case in point, its online presence well-designed.

And now, some six months later, more students on the one-year taught postgraduate programmes, who themselves stayed on to extend their studies until December, are showing new work in the degree show.

The courses which are adding content this month include the M.Litt in Curatorial Practice and the M.Litt Fine Art Practice.

Amongst many Shalmali Shetti, who studied at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in Gujurat and New Delhi, presents a publication, “this cloud may burst”, inspired by the accidental wiping of a crucial hard drive in lockdown, which brings together work from artists and writers based around the loss and preservation of memory.

Elsewhere, Marianne Vosloo, who studied Art History in Pretoria in her native South Africa, looks at the social and economic injustices occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic in her curatorial practice.

“The Art of Defiance” took its cue from street posters and placards from the numerous protests in 2020, in the creation of artwork for billboards in Glasgow.