Degree of talent
This year’s Graduate Show at Edinburgh College of Art is a celebration of creativity, writes Duncan Macmillan
Duncan Macmillan on the Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show
This year’s ECA degree show is a pretty minimal affair, but in the circumstances it is a remarkable achievement that there is show at all, and even more that the students have managed to produce good work for it. Their circumstances really have been challenging. With very limited access to the studios, and only for some students, they have had to work wherever they can find space – in their bedroom, in the garage, the garden, or wherever else. And where they have worked at home in whatever space they could find, inevitably all sorts of other pressures must have arisen. Meanwhile, those who opted to come to town, if not to college, faced similar problems whether in rented accommodation or halls of residence. In the latter, as my guide round the show remarked, they couldn’t even put a drawing pin in the wall. All the teaching has had to be online, too. It has been a really taxing social, intellectual and artistic obstacle course, and yet they have come out of it with flying colours.
Kayna Macaulay's year not-atcollege, as it were, seems to have been typical of many. She had to retreat to her family house in Cornwall which, she says, “my dad has been self-building” for a number years – a building site in fact. Nevertheless, she has made some beautiful abstract designs using found materials. These are represented in the show by a handsome digital print. Muriel Mcintyre’s circumstances, too, seem to have shaped her work. “I completed my Fine Art degree in my parents’ basement in France, the abandoned wine cellar,” she says. Inspired by this, her work explores abandoned spaces in different ways. Nothing is more eloquent of her dislocation, however, than a steel chair simply cut in half vertically and its two halves, left and right, transposed. There seems to be something poignantly relevant, too, about the inspiration behind Roisin Pharncote-rowe’s miniature beds in iphone boxes. They were inspired amongst other things, she says, by “bad furniture in rented flats.”
Mhairi Mcphail explores a domestic
Graduate Show 2021 Edinburgh College of Art ✪✪✪✪
theme which it seems might also reflect her circumstances, at least implicitly. A rather beautiful installation suggests the hearth as heart of the home, but a target hanging at its centre proposes the domestic sphere as battleground.
And in this battle she weaponises “hostess soap” in the form of the spearheads of cast iron railings. With enterprise typical of this group, she also organised a “washing line exhibition” in her back garden.
Fruzina Uhlar’s enormous whirling,