Gray's School of Art Degree Show: Stating their Case
It’s quite a trek to reach Gray’s School of Art. Half an hour by bus or an hour walking from Aberdeen’s centre, in a green garden campus on the outskirts of the city. The journey from the central belt can be offputting, but this does a disservice to the students who are working away up here, busily building an individual practice at a relative remove from the Glasgow-Edinburgh axis. Each year Gray’s produces a selection of artists of startling originality, from Stephen Thorpe (now at the Royal College) with his expanding foam canvases, to Caitlin Hynes’ shamanic print collages and Ben Martin’s delicate tensioned rope of 2014. The distance offers the space for a choice few to create a true originality.
2015’s crop of graduates are an interesting bunch. Gray’s is increasingly unique in Scottish art schools in that the painting department still largely focusses on painting, rather than presenting an array of pseudo sculpture that may or may not involve a bit of paint. There is some interesting work on display here – students are exploring modes of representation, challenging the conventions of material and burrowing deep into the canvas (at times literally) to invent new modes of expression.
Laura Porteous is one such example. Her multi-layered canvases are physically severed, a surface layer of paint in geometric form augmented by incision, flaps of material peeling back to reveal another coloured surface below. She wears the influence of Mondrian on her sleeve, following his lead in a reduced colour palette in order to properly investigate ideas of surface, spatial representation. One piece has a patina of white paint atop a geometric composition of yellow, red, blue and white triangles. The white chips away, forming a sort of contemporary archeology of modernism.
Written in a peculiarly poetic style, Nabila-Malalai Attar’s personal statement is a perfect complement to her magical, hallucinatory compositions. The sublime and the absurd collide in her strange narratives of mountain peaks and valleys, border guards and hotel resorts, a sort of Wes Anderson Apocalypse Now. Helicopters fly over a Bigfoot-like creature wielding a club, a Himalayan King Kong as imagined by Hieronymous Bosch. Elements are reminiscent of the Shahnama tradition, a hint of regal narrative art in a composition of two riders on horseback on a winding road from a burning city in the sky.
Emily Hill's paintings record a remembered Northern Irish childhood, large in scale and filled with vivid colour. A bath of rhubarb, pink stalks and bright green leaves, represents a child-eye view, the frame occupied by the vast white tub, the tops of the stalks disappearing into the sky, as tall and remote as Jack's beanstalk. A homemade badminton court, a flowerbed of bright pink blooms in front of a hedge – the works are shot though with nostalgia, a protective bubble of childish things and time in nature displayed with a masterful handle on colour.
In the Contemporary Art Practice department, encompassing sculpture, printmaking, moving image and photography, Gemma Louise Jamieson explores an interest in banger racing. She displays the fruits of her labour, a crushed painted car in whose windscreen is showing a video of the race which led to this model’s crumpled demise. An accompanying booklet documents the laborious process of refitting a car in order to smash the shit out of it on the track. The futility of endeavour, the joy of labour and a fitting allegory for the human experience? Perhaps.
Ashleigh Lauren Christie offers an array of feminist knitting. She proclaims knitting to be a fine art, a material whose relegation to the environs of craft she disputes. One wall it occupied by a series of diverse knitted vaginas, while from the ceiling hang giant pom pom balls and a stitched banner saying 'Not everyone wants to be mother.' Utilising this very gendered material, creating these deliberately gendered objects, Christie continues in the tradition of feminist fine art reclamation.
Self-proclaimed lazy artist Lindsay Milne makes trite text-based prints of quite irritating jauntiness. ‘What problems?! I’m more interested in kittens!’ screams one. Adding to the Keep Calm and Carry On canon, her work is a timely reflection of the meme and catchphrase culture that forms as a panacea to the real challenges and threats of the day. Who cares if the government are systematically destroying the welfare state and the apocalypse is nigh – I’ve got a fucking cute photo of a kitten.
Rebecca Elizabeth Fry is another artist who wears her influence on her sleeve. Louise Bourgeois looms large over this display, with a wall sized ink blot in the background and multiple casts of what look like vaginas (which have naturally been bought by the university.) Turns out they’re casts of oranges, penis flower penis and a man made of orange peel. She explores gender, male female and trans, in an array of intriguing objects.
Overall, Gray’s 2015 is a diverse show reflecting a year of graduates investigating a wide range of disciplines and concepts. The honesty of these artists’ influence is pleasing, as is the fact that this is one of the only schools to encourage the display of personal statements next to the work. It offers a way in for the viewer, a few clues to decode a unique personal language that otherwise could remain obscure.