Glasgow School of Art (GSA)’s prestigious Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme 2026 graduate exhibition is on view at the Stow Building. This year, the exhibition of 52 international artists has moved outside the main undergraduate degree show dates, and is being held as a stand-alone event. According to the GSA, the decision was made ‘to be seen alongside Glasgow International, to underline the GSA’s important connection to the wider art community and its interdependent ecology within Glasgow.’
Since its inception in 1998, the programme has been highly prestigious and is known for a pipeline to the Turner Prize. To date, seven Turner Prize winners have come from GSA programmes. Although no Turner Prize was awarded in 2020, bursaries were awarded to ten artists ‘for their significant contributions to new developments in British contemporary art.’
The Stow building, with its large windows, is close to roads and exposed to the wind. This environment creates a background sound that reminds the viewer where we are: in Glasgow, a city shaped by its industrial past, with a distinctive architectural heritage and a strong working-class culture. What I witnessed were artworks in dialogue with aspects of this character and culture. This is not because the works directly address the working-class, but because they share the city’s spirit through the collective labour behind the artworks, grounding in lived reality, questioning the world around us, and an awareness on the part of the artists about who they choose to represent when they have the stage.
One of Kate Glen‘s works is Frozen Growth Cycle. She has filled her sculptures with medical waste from two IVF (In-Vitro Fertilisation) cycles she underwent: syringes, empty vials, and plastic caps… Once tools for a medical intervention in a woman’s body, they are now waste. How many times does a woman need to push these needles into her belly, obsessing over timing, in her bedroom, mostly in silence… Kate takes this silence and creates an admiring contradiction by using happy ice lolly shapes, surrounding them with colourful LED lights, and hanging them on the wall as if they were signboards. It’s not a sign of anger; it’s taking control of the narrative and claiming space.
She uses her videos, one of which is watched on an iPhone, to talk about her painful IUT implantation and endometriosis diagnosis in the kind of very lively, chatty voice that we swipe on social media every day. In the other video, we see her performing dance moves while listening to her reading a text from hospital documents about her endometriotic cyst removal.
One thing to note is that all the works proceed at their own pace, including her beautiful paintings: there’s a calm in her hues, brushstrokes and layers, as if what she is remembering today has already been processed by her in the past.
Hannah Miller investigates the body as a site of vulnerability. Her two soap sculptures are placed on a black floor; one of them is barely standing, holding up to an IV stand, as if it’s not the IV liquid that is dissolving the soap body. Water is dripping on the floor and leaking into the body through a silicone tube. Hannah deliberately built the floor to direct water to the second sculpture, which lies on the floor in a loose, infant-like pose. The liquid follows a thin line and makes a small puddle around the sculpture. The path of that thin water-line reappears in her paintings, which are in the next room.
Her process starts with clay sculptures; she plasters them with silicone and makes moulds, then makes the soap sculptures, placing metal frames inside. She has achieved a layered materiality by combining the metal, with its tendency to rust over time when exposed to water. To avoid a clean look, she has used clay on some parts of the sculptures, maintaining the unclean appearance.
Hannah explained to me that when she started her master’s degree, her grandmother was unwell and she was in the process of losing her. She carried the weight of transience and realised that it’s impossible to capture reality in a single scene. Even if her departure point is personal, the artworks speak not merely to an individual experience but to the consumerist culture that has penetrated every part of our lives. With their materiality, the sculptures are subject to the mercy of time. The photograph above was taken last weekend, and I am not sure ‘all that is solid’ will now still be in place.
What Keith Malone creates is not a way of introducing a feeling to the reader; he paints because he lives. With oil paint, charcoal, pastel and layered materials, he explores the instability of memory, place and identity. ‘I seek out and reshape my own memories in order to reconstruct them as fragmented and blurred realities which are open to shifting narratives’, he states. For him, his working process resonates with searching the attic of an old house or exploring a junkyard. His paintings reminded me of double-exposed photographs, carrying memories from different places and times but still solid together. His doodle-like lines are stitches that keep these memories in unison, while creating a childish sense.
When you set foot in a foreign land for the first time, you notice not only the differences from home but also the similarities. This is the moment you understand that even in a stranger there is familiarity, and in distance there is closeness. Cross-media artist Ziyi Qiu takes us from Glasgow to her home town in China, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, in her video, Lingering. ‘Studying, living and travelling in different cities and countries, these trans-regional experiences have gradually led me to reflect on my own sense of identity’, Ziyi states. She captures the urban areas, buildings, scaffolding, and transportation that shape urban life. Both cities undergo constant construction, and Ziyi is aware that her return to her home town won’t be to the same place…
To reach Sydney Smith‘s monumental sculpture, which is located in the cafe area, one must walk down a few steps. This becomes part of the viewing experience. As you move closer, the mint-green giant gradually reveals itself.
The artwork is inspired by François Rabelais’ Pantagruel, a French Renaissance novel satirically criticising the 16th-century church authority and false intellectual production. By looking back to the beginnings of Renaissance satire, the artwork achieves a reflection on today’s political and social systems.
Constructed from newspaper, chicken-wire and cardboard, the 22-foot papier-mâché work depicts the novel’s giant mother, Badabec, in a birthing position. Contrary to the story, Badabec is not erased after she gives birth; she is at the centre, powerful, active and ‘open’. A screen is positioned as her vulva, featuring a puppet show that takes in fruits, vegetables, and ordinary objects. Sydney took her son’s endless appetite and gave it to Badabec as a ‘reverse nativity’.
Pien Overing is a sculptor from Amsterdam who works with found objects. Her work Pointers focuses on the history of women’s labour. It’s based on a photograph she came across, showing six women holding the minute hand on the face of a clock-tower while it was being replaced. For this work, she made four minute-hands from found objects. She says she is ‘not interested in reconstruction of unavailable materiality; instead, a taken image becomes material.’
Yiwen Bo’s work explores the condition of ’empty-full’ and aims to surprise the viewer with an ‘unexpected wonder’ in that emptiness. She used a white shoe box, empty except for a small writing on the left corner inside, which reads ‘myself’. Being the same colour as the wall makes it harder even to realise the presence of the artwork itself from afar, and it requires closer inspection: stepping closer lets you focus on the left corner, and amid the world of mental clutter, it surprises me with a moment of pure attention.
At first encounter, Finn Robinson’s paintings draw attention with their rich colours and well-defined figures that form a theatrical scene. He references Western art history and depicts queer identity with a contemporary gaze. Rather than evoking a sense of Renaissance fair spectacle, his compositions inhabit its canonical legacy. He paints from images he is emotionally drawn to and through layered colours and chromatic choices, he allows reality to shift: ‘…the truth shifts as I paint. Things change through colour, gesture, clothing, and atmosphere, and the image slips away from its source as it drifts towards my desires.’
This is just a glimpse of the many remarkable artworks in the exhibition. The exhibition continues until 21st June and will remain accessible online thereafter. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in Scotland’s contemporary art scene.
Performances
Thursday 18th June, 18:00: Fae Borodiansky, Oracle Readings, Space 2, Floor 1 (drop-in readings from 18:00 – 19:00).
Sunday 21st June, 13:00: Rho McGuire & Friends, everything I wanted to, Space 52, Floor 4 (duration 12 minutes); 13:45 Coire Simpson, Tobias Allen, Untitled Improvisation with Pianos, Floor 4 Stairwell (performance of variable length)
With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for this review.
