Invention shines through – even in the worst of times
Onwards: Gray’s School of Art Digital Degree Show Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen ✪✪✪✪
The pandemic has meant severe restrictions on access to studios and equipment for most of the year and, once again, degree shows are digital. This year Gray’s has built in more flexibility, offering visitors the option of 3D video-game style navigation or a more straightforward archival format. In contemporary art practice – the umbrella discipline that includes sculpture, print-making and electronic media – the big discovery appears to have been digital drawing. Its prevalence suggests that some students are using it instead of physical media. Some use it very well.
Alexandra Laing creates a series of pithy works about life in the pandemic, influenced by cartoons and video games. The gags – about the number of people who claim to be from one household, the clown who thought it would be over soon, and FACTS (the world’s least memorable acronym) – might date quickly, but they hit the nail on the head.
Giulia Candela “clings to drawing like a lifeline”. Her body of work in digital drawing and painting is to do with finding the beauty in the mundane and exploring personal experience, and she has the kind of talent which will shine out whether in pixels or pencils and paper.
Kelsey Leigh Grant’s work is about the almost obsessive impulse top reserve the likenessof a person who has been lost. She uses photographs of a lost loved one to create digitally cut stencils and then makes drawings which are powerful in their repetition. She also uses them to make a series of stamps which she stick son sealed letters poignantly addressed to “Her, The After Life”.
Sculptor Hannah Fraser uses found cuddly toys to make hard-edged semiabstract sculptures, then brings about a second transformation by painting them in funky playroom colours. Poppy Willox starts with inherited trinkets and transforms them using expanding foam into objects which look like bodily organs. Copper wire is added to create electric circuits, giving the impression of vitality.
In the painting department, there is a strong crop of students committed to markmaking media. there are stories implied in Hollie Beattie’s mysterious paintings of winter scenes, and Jim Tripney draws on Bible stories for a strong series of paintings on the theme of hope.
Lewis Andrew Shaw presents a series of large paintings exploring the decline of the fishing industry in the Fife village of St Monans, from the weathered surface of the harbour wall to the weathered faces of former fishermen. Rita Kermack explores the “littoral zone” where land and sea meet in forensic detail through paintings and relief works made of flamed and corroded copper.
Erin Thomson is drawn to what she doesn’t understand, to riddles and codes, making artist’s books inspired by cunie form tablets and drawings which include coded elements of music. Once again, art students prove they are capable of invention, even in the worst of circumstances.
Until 19 July,