As Scotland’s art schools stage their annual graduate showcases, one thing is clear: painting is making a comeback. Susan Mansfield visited all four colleges to select highlights for Artmag readers.
If optimism were electricity, we could power the national grid by the energy of the students graduating from Scotland’s four main art schools. As the art colleges in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen open their doors to showcase emerging talent, the air positively bristles with hope and creative potential.
2025 is a bumper year, in part due to students who deferred their enrolment during the pandemic. This group arrived at art school with the pent-up energy of lockdown, ready to be hands-on, learn new skills and make work on an ambitious scale.
“What we’ve noticed this year is the ambition in working at scale,” says Pernille Spence, programme director of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee. “It dropped because of covid, students were terrified to scale anything up. If you’re going to make big work, this is the time to do it, when you’ve got the space to go a little bit wild.”
While this year group have proved their adeptness at many things, from throwing pots to building electronic circuits, one strand is particularly strong: more students are painting than in any year for the last two decades. And while undergraduate painting can be a hit-or-miss affair, more students are painting well, and committing themselves to developing their skills.
Although there is a corresponding drop in electronic and lens-based media, all of life is here, as it always is. The trick at art school is to find your creative voice, the language in which you want to express yourself, then go out into the world and make your work.
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee
Dundee’s art school is always first off the starting blocks in degree show season. Duncan of Jordanstone tends to be strong on skills and this year’s cohort of graduates have embraced the opportunity to learn as many as possible.
“Arriving towards the end of the pandemic, they wasted no time getting the benefit of all the workshops we have here, from casting in bronze to 3D Design,” says Spence. “Some of them have used almost every workshop.”
Duncan of Jordanstone often produces good painters, but the number of students painting this year was the first indication that this was going to be a vintage year for painting across the country.
Tom Speedy is a confident painter, working at scale on canvases as wide as his armspan. Capturing figures in landscapes, drifting or displaced, he works with strong colour and experiments with mixing directly on the canvas then disrupting the paint with abrasive substances like bleach, turpentine and even sand. Anney White is another ambitious painter, making large abstract pieces full of energy and colour, which are arranged in groups.
Several of the female students are interested in reclaiming the painting of the female body, subjected to the male gaze throughout the history of Western art. Emma Pirrie’s nudes are women wrapped up in their own thoughts, resisting the gaze of the onlooker, while Eilidh Pirie works with a similar theme in her excellent large-scale pastel drawings, subverting the trope of the ‘reclining woman’ by reclaiming the bedroom as a space for rest, contemplation and fun.
If you’re going to make big work, this is the time to do it, when you’ve got the space to go a little bit wild.” – Pernille Spence, programme director of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
Kayley Mullen is a fine traditional painter, painting landscapes en plein air in Scotland and Spain, and impressive studio portraits inspired by mythical figures such as Pandora and Persephone. Jenna Donald’s paintings quietly capture people engaged in ordinary tasks. I particularly enjoyed her paintings of women painting and decorating while their children play with paintbrushes on the floor.
Hannah Maguire found her artistic voice through inventing a Scottish pop star, Roxie Burns, and charting her rise and fall through photography and printmaking. Lisa Speirs Fleming explores the emotional strangeness of early motherhood through a collection of impressive linocuts and woodcuts.
Robin Faye made a 30-minute opera based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, making the sets and costumes, recruiting the singers from Dundee University’s Opera Society and capturing the whole piece on film. Christopher Adam’s 45-minute film An Guth/The Voice is both satirical and profound, looking at language, belonging and traditional music.
There are wonders on a small scale too, such as Poppy Gannon’s pieces made by cutting and stitching dried leaves and displaying them in custom-made ceramics. Joy Jennings has made a multitude of small figures, The Formables, in various colours, weights and textures, and encourages visitors of all ages to play with them.
Show now ended. Online showcase: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/graduate-showcase
Glasgow School of Art
The degree show at Scotland’s biggest art school got bigger this year, with over 160 graduates and an extra floor in the Stow Building opened to provide more exhibition space. It’s harder to stand out in such a large field, but the best work combines ambition, skill and strong presentation.
“The ambition of some of the installations and concepts this year is really impressive,” says Marita Fraser, head of Sculpture and Environmental Art. “Some of the technical skills people have developed this year have been extraordinary.”
“Each artist is on their own trailblazing bespoke route to making.” – Sara Barker, lecturer in Painting & Printmaking, Glasgow School of Art
Take, for example, Florence MacLennan, who has built a small tin chapel, furnished it with pews and decorated the interior with frescoes and murals. These feel both fresh and very old, paying tribute to unnamed artists and craftspeople down the centuries. Or Ethan Logan, who has recreated a complete replica of a Chinese restaurant, right down to the smell of five spices and a fully-functioning kitchen, in which he cooks.
Maha Al Yousefi is an outstanding sculptor, including at a monumental scale. She uses figurative language to explore themes of strength and vulnerability. Also from Syria, Medeni Yanat has built an impressive multi-sensory environment, complete with music, the smell of incense, and a kinetic sculpture which casts shadow figures on the walls.
“Interdisciplinary” and “international” are watchwords at GSA. Sara Barker, lecturer in Painting & Printmaking, praised the students for “the broadest sense of interdisciplinary practice. Each artist is on their own trailblazing bespoke route to making.”
However, for a significant number of them, that route involved picking up a paintbrush. Esther Douglas is a strong portrait painter, capturing something of the spirit of her sitters. Kyle Blain is committed to painting working-class experience, using emulsion rather than conventional oil paints, capturing moments, memories and family interactions. By contrast, Evelyn Munro sets her painterly dramas against sumptuous interiors: her lone characters, often painted with animals, suggest narratives of eccentric aristocrats.
Gabriella Burns explores the male gaze on young women. Her paintings of women, lined up as if for a school photograph or military parade, focus on the uniforms and the patterns they make. Lola Buchanan is another able painter, she seems to enjoy exploring contrasts and juxtapositions in her work.
Mary Lydon, who is Ukrainian, works in paint and textiles, weaving images of drones into her pieces alongside traditional symbols and patterns. She has helped organise exhibitions for Ukrainian artists in Glasgow through the year. Veronica Mee works vividly in textiles, making abstract works by painting and collaging.
There are more lens-based media at GSA than elsewhere. In Vertical Glasgow, Ellis Bairstow has worked out how to get a perfectly symmetrical image of a tower block, and tracks the history of Glasgow’s high-rise housing. Thomas Main makes beautiful black and white images of the male body, focusing on the gradual effects of ageing, and Axl Kasper has retraced with his camera the path taken by the Arab invaders in North Africa’s Berber lands in the 7th and 8th centuries.
Show ends June 8, online showcase https://gsashowcase.net
Edinburgh College of Art
In Edinburgh, the resurgence of painting is marked, with 50 students – nearly half this year’s cohort of graduates – grouping together to produce their own painting catalogue. “There has been a massive resurgence of painting in contemporary art, so this might reflect that,” says Marianne Greated, Head of Art. “It feels like there has been a really committed group of painters this year who are always in the studio producing lots of work, and they have spurred one another on.”
Those painters range widely across subject matter, style and even scale. Finlay Trevor paints farmers and fishermen in the remote Northwest of Scotland in a traditional style. Esther Forse paints model villages and film sets with an implicit sense of threat or menace.
Ella Williams paints how memories feel: buildings, people, objects, come to the fore or slip into the background in her work, which is beautifully executed in pastel shades. Ella Markell paints instinctively, removing as well as adding, to create images which feel weighted with meaning.
Hattie Quigley works at an ambitious scale in a semi-abstract style. Her biggest work is the size of a Renaissance altarpiece, full of light and movement. Meanwhile Alyssa Atkinson chooses to work small, capturing glimpses of ordinary life on wooden discs the size of coasters. Amy McLean’s Seeing Double series pairs images which echo one another visually or thematically.
Amy Val Sema delves into the history of Albania in her work, while Elene Sturua, who is from Georgia, makes paintings which hint at the troubled politics of that country with a pleasing touch of the surreal. Brynn Byers paints what she calls “speedscapes”, semi-abstract landscapes as if glimpsed from the window of a train. Tash Runciman’s work is inspired by cinema and captures people in moments of distraction.
There is also strong work which isn’t painting: Kristel Bodensiek’s sculptural pieces, including a screen made of diamond-shaped glass; Laura Compton’s unruly sculptures which spill out of the walls and floor as if the building was coming to life; and Jackie Gibb’s washing lines of blackened clothes, which speak of the domestic trauma resulting from political decisions.
Elena Gadd’s The Funeral is a series of giant masks which visitors can stand inside to listen to the voices around the coffin. Alyssa Miller makes 1,001 origami cranes from family photographs to celebrate her extended family in Hawaii and Japan.
Show ends June 6, online showcase at https://www.graduateshow.eca.ed.ac.uk
Gray’s School of Art
Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen is the last of the four main Scottish art schools to unveil its graduate showcase. It’s also the smallest, which makes the show a more manageable size for visitors to enjoy. Here, as at the other schools, painting is in the ascendency with around half of the 50 students in Fine Art making painting a major part of their exhibitions.
Anna Swapp is a talented painter. Her subject is the house left behind on her grandmother’s death, which really means her subjects are loss and memory, how to hold on to a sense of what is gone. She paints her grandmother’s absence: the chair which still bears her imprint, the shopping bag left hanging on the back of the door.
Nicole Mackintosh paints memories in the making: family celebrations, birthday parties with friends. These moments pass all too quickly, often before we register their importance, she argues. Her paintings are doing just that. Ellie McAllan is capturing memories of another family home. She combines painting and digital print, which is hard to do well, but she blends them quite seamlessly.
Mairi Blair’s paintings chart her own life. A survivor of childhood cancer, she went on find release through ballet, and paints both self portraits and the movements of dancers. Yasmin Brown’s work is intriguing, focusing in on the smallest details: a piece of ribbon, a hand, a jewel. She has a beautifully expressive painting style.
Sophie Scott is inspired by Victorian and Georgian portraits of women, homing-in on details which speak to the nuances of female experience, while Marisa Parker’s work offers a critique of the Golden Age Hollywood, of beauty laced with exploitation.
Among the non-painters, Kiera Walsh has made a colourful mobile of textile sculptures celebrating some of the world’s smallest life-forms. Leona Andrew is concerned about the environment too, making lovely “eco-prints” of leaves and displaying them tied to tree branches.
Arabella Joy Sciallo captures breath in flowing line drawings and tiny ceramic pebbles. Visitors are encouraged to pause in her space, breathe, and make their own pebble towers. Matthew Urquhart is one of very few sculptors. He is interested in architecture and how it shapes us, and makes impressive model buildings, opening them up or turning them upside down, playing with their features.
As with the other degree shows this year, more painting at Gray’s means correspondingly less sculpture, film and installation. However, experience would suggest that what goes around comes around. Let’s celebrate a group of talented young painters while we have the chance.
Ends June 15
