Masters Show: Top art in Dundee

Dundee University, August 21-29

For any student of the arts, the degree show should be the highpoint of their academic experience.

While students may well have a rewarding and valuable relationship with a tutor, which develops their work greatly, it’s the opportunity afforded by their degree show to finally put their work on show to the public in a degree context which is, if not make or break, certainly a hugely important step between education and the real world.

For students on the Dundee University and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design’s masters courses, that chance will come this month.

Forty-seven of them will be showing their work across a range of disciplines here, with graduating students drawn from courses in animation and visualisation; arts and humanities; and art, society and publics, as well as medical art and forensic art.

“Our students work in a variety of different techniques,” says Mary Modeen, who’s the PhD and research degree coordinator, as well as the course director in MA Fine Art at the university.

“There are quite a lot of painters this year, a couple of printmakers, one person who’s doing an installation with video and sound in quite an abstract way. Another video installation is shown in such a way that it’s reflected from some broken pieces of mirror.

“There’s one really stunning installation by Susie Johnston, which is in two parts. In one room are exploded shell casings, which have been used by the Ministry of Defence, and in another room, the artist has taken a two and a half ton steel oilfield wellhead that’s been blown. The force of the explosion has made this huge piece of steel into an extraordinary sculptural form, which she’s sandblasted and repainted.”

Not that Modeen is picking favourites from what she says is a strong field of work this year.

“Already at this stage, even while they’re still students, we’ve already had a number of students who have won awards, prizes and international residencies,” she says. “One is going to Iceland and another is going to the Arctic Circle next year – she’s called Ellis O’Connor, her work is exceptional.”

She says it’s a very healthy state of affairs that no two artists here are the same, each finding their own voice with work which ranges from complete abstraction to portraiture and figurative painting.

She points out that three of the artists showing here – O’Connor, Sam Wilson and Craig Wright – were included in the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition in Edinburgh this year and went on to show at the Fleming Collection in London – a measure of the quality we can expect to see at this show.

Ellis O’Connor sitting beside one of her pieces. Her work has featured in the Fleming Collection in London.