ECA Degree Show 2026: The Review
At their graduate showcase, students at the Edinburgh College of Art demonstrate solidarity with their striking faculty
The Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show 2026 sprawls across Lauriston Place Building, inviting you to weave in between the future drivers of art, design, music and architecture. There’s art here for every interest and niche, with artists ready to intrigue you with a new discipline or push you outside your comfort zone.
As ECA members of the University and College Union (UCU) participate in a Marking and Assessment Boycott in response to potential job cuts, notions of precarity and instability permeated the display.
Precarity fosters solidarity, with many students choosing to put a statement of support with their striking faculty alongside descriptions of their work. izi Coonagh’s “Stop the Cuts” banner couldn’t be any clearer in its political position. Her installation, Blackthorn Boundary, a coven of branches and dried wildlife in the centre of the big white room, offered a space for rest and unravelling during a stressful period for students and staff alike. Natasha Faulkner’s sculptures also offered a space for reflection, in this case on the materiality of gender and the bind gendered bodies are under to be both desirable and productive. In the same room, Emily Carrell analyses man-made environmental degradation through eco-feminism, cyanotypes and photographs made with plant-based film developer.
Natasha Faulkner, Arrowhead (2026). Courtesy of the artist
Elsewhere, some artists were preoccupied with the body as a canvas. Scarlett Tooze’sYou are Red and Blue, a series of jump-off-the-page collages, showed the body as a co-conspirator in escape. Ellie Maxwell has printed close-up photos of the body on stone to contrast the pressure we exert on our delicate skin. While Rumeng Chen considers the post-human form in her sculpture installation featuring human figures from our evolutionary past, present and possible transformative future.
After protest comes rest, and then fun. Two invigilators told me Selenay Tektunali’s Baddie with a Bad Passport satirised the rigidity of how you must present yourself to have the Right to Remain or UK citizenship. Tektunali’s photobooth provides fun instructions on the difference between what you should say about yourself in a Home Office application vs a Hinge profile; unsurprisingly, no mention of the success rate on either of the two platforms. Neve Healy, meanwhile, satires the female experience at university. The Loser's Guide to Being Cool zine made me feel at home within its glossy pages, with the main character fluctuating between confidence and self-doubt.
The only installation I could physically enter was a disco set up by Yiran Chen that took me back to school discos two decades ago – pink lights, reflective CDs on the wall and all! FLEHM COLLECTIVE offered an episode of a hilarious puppet game show. Each castmate had pride of place on a podium, worked on and puppeteered by a combination of the collective – Melena Orleans, Toni Lay, Ellie Gilbert and Levi Andrew.
izi Coonagh, Ground (2026). Courtesy of the artist
The Illustration students brought levity to the high stakes of a Graduate Show. Xiang Li created a game, which I had to stop myself from jumping in front of a child to play. In Unbound Paths, players move wooden blocks to find their way home in a dreamland, underscoring Li’s desire to show “there is no single fixed order or direction”. This sense of directionlessness and reimagining also emerges in Li’s fabric collage depicting Dunbar, in which the location names are replaced by the artist’s personal memories of each area.
Poppy Morgan’s work lured me into the textile and design exhibition space. Her use of pop culture motifs, such as the Heinz Ketchup bottle contrasted with delicate lace, brought together design and humour perfectly. She wasn’t afraid of the hard questions, either. “Custard or Ice cream?” asked a lace collar, in reference to what you have on top of your apple crumble. I stood for too long trying to pick one side of the fence. Meanwhile, Honey Hughes printed farm life scenes on a handmade, speckled barkcloth, creating a tapestry depicting the origins of the clothes we wear and simpler times before the hyper-consuming modern textile industry we know now.
It’s impossible to review every piece on show, and there is fantastic work I have seen that hasn’t been touched on in this review. But whatever rooms you find yourself in, whichever artists you come across, there is a treasure trove of talent within the Edinburgh College of Art, with artistic voices and practices that deserve the Scottish art scene's attention.
The ECA 2026 Graduate Show runs until 5 Jun; more info at eca.ed.ac.uk/event/eca-graduate-show-2026