THE SKINNY
THE SKINNY
Graduate Showcase 2022
Fine Art This year’s School of Fine Art cohort interrogate materials and ideas with equal fervour and ambition Words: Isgard Hague and Corrie Jennison
The Head Massager, Katie Curry, Sculpture and Environenmental Art
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HARLING, Josie Smith, Painting and Printmaking
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The School of Fine Art Degree Show runs 1-12 Jun in the Stow Building, 64 Shamrock Street, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net
June 2022
June 2022
T
forced upon him by small town mentalities when he was growing up between small towns in the north of Scotland. In his paintings this cathartic process of unravelling plays out, and emerging narratives spiral across the canvases. In Fine Art Photography, Nora Mackenzie’s work also conveys themes of memory, as well as the fragility of time, change and the marks we leave behind. In a world where everything is constantly changing, Nora captures scenes that are remnants of the past. While there is a physical absence of people in her photographs, their traces are made known through chalk scratchings made by kids on a winter’s day, or an old football shirt tied to a fence to remember a loved one. Loud Hand by Kaya Erdinc attempts to document an intimate collaboration with philosopher Bibi Straatman, with whom Kaya closely read several texts from the Christian mystical tradition. Her work includes a silent portrait moving image shot on Super 8 film, accompanied by a long prose poem. Within his exhibition space, Louis SyedAnderson has constructed and curated his own floor-based landscape, as well as spatially engaging with the physical architecture of the exhibition space. Influenced by the architectural structures and materials of the urban landscape, his designs emulate the experience of navigating through those spaces, echoing both the contours and structural forms of the urban environment. Megan Auld’s work Burning Dust centres on the history of women in the industrial age in Scotland. Her work references the volatile landscape through a range of materials and objects, revealing the labour-intensive and fatal past of factory workers. Also utilising a myriad of materials is Spencer Dent, whose work explores the concept of genderlessness. A series of self portraits use costume and make-up to distort the body and figure, screen prints and sculpture depict a genderless figure, and weaving reflects make-up design processes.
Graduate Showcase 2022
questioning of how functional objects are appreciated, by playing on the contradictions of functional objects in a gallery setting. Failing to Serve explores ideas of imperfection, the process of making, and whether meaning is static or always changing. Painting and Printmaking student Sasha Ballon’s experience working as a tree surgeon is important in her practice. Recycled wood from job sites is combined with chainsaw woodcarving, welding and weaving in her exploration of craft as a site of resistSpencer Dent, Fine Art Photography ance. The work is inherently queer in its potential to upend categorical ways he School of Fine Art final year students of making, and critique of gendered stereotypes in have been busy. Their dedication and hard trades and craft. Expect a collage of moving image, work is clear to see in this year’s highly sculpture and textiles, with live performances on anticipated Degree Show, the first in the Stow preview night and the evening of 1 June. Building for three years. Across the disciplines Josie Swift’s installation HARLING is an there are interrogations of ways of making, proexploration of modern Scottish mythology, via a cess and material, as well as a questioning appebbledash sofa and video in which Swift and proach to the world, resulting in work that is open, women from her hometown recite her poem to the innovative and exciting. ‘gods’ of harling (Scots for pebbledash). Drawing In Sculpture and Environmental Art, Zane on the physical make-up of homes and common Drees takes life in the post-digital age as his generational memories of spending hours on subject-matter, using methods and materials such YouTube, it’s dedicated to “the women of the as hand-carving, weaving and quilting to demoncommunity I grew up in, an ode to the women that strate a rejection of modern technologies. Yet, birthed our generation.” used as a tool to ground and reflect on his own Nancy Pilkington works with painting and life, the work evokes contradictory feelings. While objects, which she uses to imagine an ‘exit from critical, he is – like the rest of us – dependent on linear time and logic’ within the setting of the modern technology. The viewer experiences child’s den – a shape-shifting place where creative feelings of intimacy and fear, humour and discomrepair is possible. You are invited to take shelter in fort: the ambiguities of modern life, a domestic this refuge from conflict and aggression. James surrealism. Cydney Lovett-Downey’s Super 8 Johnson expands print and image making into collage film And Once He Used To Love Me is sound and sculptural installations, where the idea constructed from found home movies and is an of print emitting sound has led him to create eerie, dreamy, compassionate meditation on the hybrid stretcher sound systems. The work comes passing of time and the human experience. There from a combination of physical material experiis a double sense of loss: we grieve for the figures mentation and digital image sampling. Johnson is who exist only on spools of film, but also the loss interested in spaces and feelings that are in limbo, of an art form – a ‘video rendered requiem’. between states – a notion which emerges in his Angus Rushin’s work centres on the narrative subject matter and material. encapsulated in the grain of trees. Symbols of Loss Through the process of documentation, is an invocation to celebrate and memorialise restoration and reproduction of family photoGlasgow’s ash tree population, which currently graphs of her mother and grandmother, Chloe faces extinction. Where the saw is used as a ‘biogra- Beddow finds a physical material connection to pher of the material’, the archiving of the grain of the her grandmother, whom she never met, articulatwood serves to materialise the memory and life of ing the passing of time. The imagery in Finn the tree. Joseph Weisberg’s ongoing project Mounds Robinson’s paintings comes together in a collage consists of the documentation and installation of of personal experience, online culture and art urban, suburban, and rural piles of used, to-be used, history, where his identity is appropriated and and unwanted piles of miscellaneous material. imitated. Intensely personal, his work represents Weisberg shows an appreciation of their sculptural an attempt to finally make sense of his identity, qualities and the ‘covert creatives’ – the people and after the ‘facade of fear and second-guessing’ machinery who make them – in an act of recognition for the overlooked in our surroundings. An in-person exhibition also allows for interactive installations, such as Katie Curry’s The Head Massager, where personal responsibility in the age of the internet is explored through the concept of action and unknown consequence. This is brought into the physical realm, as the person in control of the head massager (the action) cannot see the results of their actions (the consequence). The objects in Rosa Gally’s installation embody her
Prunus Avium (Figure II), Sasha Ballon, Painting and Printmaking
