This year, the Royal Scottish Academy celebrates its 200th anniversary and the RSA New Contemporaries remains a vital, vibrant initiative to promote emerging artists. Now in its 17th year, this exhibition showcases the work of 64 graduates selected from the 2025 Degree Shows at the five Art Colleges around Scotland.
‘Since 1826, The Royal Scottish Academy’s mission has always been to support the study of fine art and architecture. The RSA New Contemporaries presents an extraordinary breadth of work and showcases a deep excitement for materials and processes.‘ – Michael Visocchi RSA, Exhibition Convener.
Here is the most promising talent across painting, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, photography, film and experimental installation, exploring contemporary themes of identity, politics, society and the environment. The new graduates selected for this exhibition were eligible for prizes worth a total of £25,000.
Dominating the central Gallery 2 are three elegant, ethereal landscape wall hangings by Cameron W Tucker, a synthesis of modern digital practice and traditional Japanese woodblock Edo printmaking. The handmade satin Kimono adds a theatrical element to the cultural narrative and is entitled Lament to a Lost World.
Unseen III is an intricate design of jagged mountain peaks overlaid with topographic linework depicts a dreamlike dimension rather than a naturalistic scene. The harmonious layering of cool violets contrasting with warm coral creates shadowy depth and tonal variation. A full moon, partly obscured by drifting clouds, evokes subtle rhythmic movement, while the printing on smooth duchess satin enhances the pearly sheen of luminosity.
Kate Hall grew up in East Wales and pastoral rural life is the focus of her work. Landscape illustrates her intuitive, semi-abstract approach, simplifying the scene into interlocking geometric blocks. The precise shapes blend the fluid mass of dark water and flat planes of land, where colour is muted but expressive: pale ochres and creams juxtapose opaque black and deep blue under the shimmering light in the sky. Perspective is deliberately ambiguous, the horizon line stretched and distant. This interpretative engagement with the landscape feels more of a personal memory of space, place and mood than literal depiction.
Winner of the Outer Spaces Award, Kate Hall’s landscapes are mesmerising in their strong, compositional clarity, also seen in Watching for Rain, the sharp diagonal cliff cutting across to divide land and water. This crisp linear structure guides the eye toward the horizon with a delicate balance between solidity and openness, giving a wide, panoramic view. Poised between geographical realism and abstraction, there’s a sense of atmospheric stillness as grey rain clouds hover in the distance.
‘In a village just south of Ullapool, down on the beach, a widow took shelter in a cave. Her name was Isobel Mackenzie and she had nowhere else to go. The legacy of the Clearances and the abuse of power, I hope to tell the stories of the past exploring how exactly humans fit into a landscape older than life’. – Cora Macmillan
On a crumbled map of the Scottish Highlands and Islands is a ceramic beetle covered in lichen with antler-like mandibles. Wittily titled Glutton, the large-scale insect appears to crawl over the rugged geographical contours, marked with names of mountains, lochs and villages. With timely reference to world affairs today, this illustrates an act of unlawful invasion; the creature is metaphorically ‘devouring’ the land through personal greed or political colonisation. The narrative power lies in the fact this ancient landscape has long been the Highlanders’ home, rich in cultural heritage and memories. (NLS Purchase Prize)
Freya Glass crafts textile art from destruction to repair from found and collected materials, ‘ripping, tying, scratching, marking, staining, mending, sewing, knotting, exposing and starting again’.
Level is a collage of flowing strips and patches of coloured fabric which overlap like improvised seams. Clean-edged and frayed swatches of floral pink, earthy brown, soft cream and grey reinforce the idea of harmony created from discarded leftovers. Against a background of sketched figures and objects, visible stitching and subtle puckers emphasise the hand-made, repaired nature of the tapestry. This layered, tactile surface turns the practice of piecing-together found cotton into a reflection of sustainability. (Sir William Gillies Bequest Prize)
The traditional pastime of embroidery has long defined ideas of class and gender. Veronica Mee uses textiles and household materials to explore social expectations of a working mother in Embracing the Chaos, to evoke connections and continuity. Composed of velvet and cotton sewn together, the intertwined swirls are like petals, leaves and tendrils of a plant. As a feminine art, quilting creates a visual metaphor for the unseen labour of family life and the emotional care and commitment of motherhood. (VAA New Artist)
‘There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she’ll die!
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled inside her…’
In The Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Bethan Roberts takes the nursery rhyme (which also features a bird, cat, dog and horse) into darkly humorous, melodramatic territory. The reclining lady appears dazed, as if overwhelmed by what she has consumed, while fragmented animals seem to merge across her body. The loosely sketched composition is chaotic and fluid with distorted limbs, figures, creatures and background-blurring boundaries. Influenced by the artist Jon Rafman, who observes the absurdity of human experience, Roberts depicts the children’s story through psychological ideas of fetish and fantasy. (Edinburgh Printmakers Award)
Also concerned with storytelling, Sophie Scott illustrates the Victorian fascination with death veiled in funereal black, in a series of portraits.
In Tied in Red the young girl is realistically portrayed, her black dress with pretty lace collar symbolising the etiquette of grief, controlled and decorative. The red ribbon threaded through her hair, however, reflects life, vitality, even blood, in contrast to the black-and-white palette of mourning. Her serious expression is introspective, with a direct yet distant gaze that hides any sense of sorrow and sentimentality: this is a public performance but also deeply personal – an unspoken experience of loss.
Tom Speedy often bases his figurative landscapes on snapshots taken on his travels. Depicted as a dark silhouette, Fisher Boy is less about individual identity than mood and place. Water shimmers across waves of turquoise, gold and black reflecting light over the surface. The child stands at the edge, fishing rod poised in stillness rather than sporting action. A strong sense of tranquillity is expressed through the rhythmic flow of colour and the hint of the glowing rays at sunset.
Speedy’s paintings are instantly reminiscent of the artist Peter Doig, whose compositions of remote landscapes exist in the realms of memory and imagination.
Adrift presents a suspended world in which a solitary figure appears to float in isolation through an immense blue landscape. The perspective is deliberately unstable, the mountains and lake drifting with strange concentric forms. Overall, an elusive dreamscape to evoke a sense of vulnerability and detachment from reality. (Walter Scott Award)
Thea Moston specialises in a traditional Japanese technique called Shibori which means ‘to wring or squeeze’ – the original form of tie-dyeing fabric – as well as to bind, stitch, fold, twist, knot and compress cloth. In Pock, the threads and fibres of upholstery material and silk are stiffened, flattened and smoothed through steam heat to create a lacy, floral pattern. As in pockmarked skin, the surface in places is pitted with indented scars to create the weave.
The large scale and intricate crafting is seriously impressive viewed close-up in detail; this photograph cannot capture the soft, tactile quality and decorative design of this textile artwork. (RSA Friends Prize).
Combining multi-media and performance, Rachel Hetherington presents a short film, A 2D Girl in a 3D World relating her tragi-comic experience coping with adulthood. The miniature set is a colourful cardboard dolls’ house, in which she appears like a character in a video game as if trapped in a continual loop through the mundane repetition of daily life.
In short, snappy scenes, Rachel makes breakfast before it’s time to ‘work from home’ at her Apple laptop with coffee mug to hand, as she reveals how tired and bored she is with this tedious existence. Minimalist and magical, this is brilliantly imaginative in dramatic concept and visual creativity.
This is just a short overview of a few of the highlights with so much more exemplary artwork. The prestigious Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Prize was presented to Clare Flynn for her stunning photographs which capture the essence of tranquillity, as in The Sea.
‘RSA New Contemporaries sits at the heart of the Academy’s founding purpose, to support the next generation whose ideas and voices will shape the future of creative practice in Scotland and beyond’. – Colin Greenslade, Director, RSA.
Admission £8 / £5, free on Mondays; free entry for RSA Friends. The full range of artworks can be viewed online. The RSA partners the Own Art scheme, allowing artworks to be purchased in 10 monthly interest-free instalments.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for this review.
