Liverpool John Moores Fine Art Degree Shows: Doll Glaze Gossip

Sandwiches, disembodied heads and a miniature coliseum: it’s Liverpool School of Art & Design Degree Show 2015

Feature by Sacha Waldron | 01 Jul 2015

Unfortunately there is nothing to really blow you away at this year’s John Moores Fine Art degree show, which has been titled Doll Glaze Gossip. There is a generally unenergetic feel to much of the individual work and to the show as a whole, and we think someone has forgotten turn on a few of the projections. This could be, of course, our fault. We're here on the afternoon of the final day of the show and it’s rather like the final week of Venice – after all that exertion, work, adrenalin and footfall, it’s finally over, the air squeezed out like a deflated balloon. Far more impressive is the work on show in the graphic design/illustration group, exhibiting a couple of floors down, which still feels like it has some life left in it.

There are (or ‘were’ by the time you read this) a couple of students and works to linger on. Jenn Challinor has some nice black and white images, particularly one of someone holding a miniature coliseum in the palm of their hands, mounted on a white plywood structure. The point of the structure isn't clear, but it does make you walk around it to see more of the work, and this is slightly more interesting than had it just been mounted on the wall. There are some other interesting ply moments in the main section of the show; although practical in hanging canvas and sculpture, from behind they're reminiscent of Céline Condorelli’s Additionals, and it's easy to imagine other, often social, uses beyond the show.

Further into the show there are some good photographs of sandwiches in plastic bags, which we noted down at the time as being made by Jack Harmsworth but, on later research, it seems he makes drawings/paintings of old men’s heads, which we don’t remember seeing in the exhibition. This brings us on to the way the show is labelled and catalogued. Each work has a little yellow raffle ticket Sellotaped in front of it with a number on. You then take the rather cute little yellow publication/catalogue and cross reference the number with a numbered name in the back of the book. So far, fine(ish), but no helpful little pictures or anything. Then the same student's number matches to one in the front of the book and you find some cut-up poems, sometimes in English, sometimes in gobbledygook. Look for the number again in the centre of the book and you find the descriptions of the work or statement. More often than not these are just as confusing as the written experiments in the front. This seems overly complicated and not very illuminating. Perhaps that’s the point of the raffle tickets: it doesn’t matter who made what, like a lucky dip. But if someone had wanted, for example, to buy those sandwich photographs, or show them in a future exhibition – that’s an opportunity missed for that student because of unnecessary detective work.

Anyway. Focusing on the positives: we enjoy the biscuit coloured painting with figures and birds from Jon Schofield. From his work description in the publication, it might be about primordial births and cyclic wombs, but it’s hard to tell. The painting is just the right and interesting side of ugly. This work is next to a really quite horrid Gormley-ripped figure and silhouette, by Jonathan Shaw. Although it’s pretty nasty, the two works work oddly well in tandem; these two should show together more often. As a little aside to this, when trying to find out what other work Shaw makes, the publication directs us to his Instagram, which contains, weirdly and pleasingly, just four posts – a snowman, a baby, a pony and two wrinkled peppers. Like it.

Best in show among this year’s JMU students goes to the only work given its own room, on the ground floor of the building and away from the majority of the other works. A projection fills one wall, showing a disembodied, undulating Beckett head talking, in stilted computer speak, about her feelings, often including memories and thoughts on situations alluding to her perceived physical bodily presence in certain scenarios. Made by Richard Coburn, his work is not only the ponderous, slightly moany Red Dwarf Holly head, but also the setup of the room. Chairs are set out in audience in front of the head, yet you can also see the head on the Mac computer screen set up next to it. It seems as if the head is actually within the computer controlling the larger projected head. In this way the characters seem split and, in the sterile, slightly corporate feel of the JMU meeting room, there's a feeling that you've been called to a meeting with both of them.

So what to say for closing comments? A few good bits but also some dull – do not, however, see this writeup as gratuitous criticism of the whole JMU course or students, but as a rallying call to the current second year.

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