GSA Degree Show 2025: MFA

The Master of Fine Art class of 2025 have produced works that sift through the residue of the ordinary, searching for new forms of belonging, memory, and meaning amidst a landscape of erosion and uncertainty.

Rather than chasing the spectacular or the monumental, many of this year’s artists put their attention to smaller fractures – the unnoticed edges where time, labour, and memory quietly leave their marks. Across the Degree Show preparations, what emerges is not a singular vision but a shared impulse: to linger in spaces of fragility, and to rework the remnants of daily experience into something stubbornly resonant.

Drawing from the quick, informal marks scattered across the city, Jennifer Aldred’s work captures the ways people leave traces of themselves in public spaces. In drawings like Ian, she gathers gestures from scratched bathroom doors, layered billboards, and the faded remnants of renovation sites, reassembling them into dense, layered compositions. Alongside these urban fragments, she introduces small objects, like toy cars, plastic nameplate pendants, flattening and enlarging them through drawing until they slip between the personal and the symbolic. Her practice reflects on the human urge to assert identity in fleeting ways, and on how these signs, like a scrawled name or a fake diamond’s shimmer, once vivid, inevitably blur, overlap, and transform over time.

This attention to the overlooked extends into William Armstrong’s paintings, which explore the forgotten peripheries of the city. Through long walks across industrial estates, gas stations, and retail parks, he documents landscapes shaped for vehicles more than people – spaces where human movement feels tentative, even misplaced. His canvases reconstruct these peripheral sites with a quiet tension, balancing the starkness of infrastructural decay with moments of unexpected lyricism. Armstrong’s practice suggests that even the most transient and utilitarian spaces bear the imprint of uncertain human presence.

Jennifer Aldred, Master of Fine Art for GSA Degree Show 2025

Labour, emotional fatigue, and the contemporary condition lie at the heart of Sophie Stewart’s practice. Her sculptural interventions – rusting restaurant bill trays, faux-concrete lottery stands, and found objects – confront the dehumanising realities of precarious employment, where enforced optimism – like “Yes I Can” – rings hollow amid burnout and economic uncertainty. These quiet disruptions reveal both the illusion of hope and the weight of entrapment, offering a sharp yet humorous critique of consumer culture and societal expectation.

A different kind of intimacy unfolds in Matthew Kriske’s living-room-like installation, where watercolour paintings shaped like Polaroids cluster across softly painted walls and spill into the space. Each painting, delicate and translucent, evokes a fragment of memory – a scene glimpsed, a feeling half-held. Paired with a murmuring sound piece of confessional poetry, Kriske’s work constructs a domestic atmosphere that feels both familiar and slightly unmoored, as if the notion of 'home' were constantly rearranging itself. His practice suggests that family, home, and identity are less fixed entities than mutable fields, stitched together through dreams, losses, and the blurry sediment of everyday life.

Similarly attentive to the poetics of memory, Sophia Archontis layers handwritten poems, photographs, and sound recordings to evoke the shifting terrains of nostalgia and self-discovery. Her sound pieces, built from overlapping voices reading the same text, produce a disorienting yet tender chorus, where rhythms slip, words dissolve, and the act of remembering becomes a shared and unstable experience. In one handwritten line, she asks: “What does thinking sound like?” – a question that resonates across the exhibition, where thought itself becomes something audible, fractured, and unresolved.

Throughout the Degree Show, there is a palpable sense of artists resisting closure. Meaning remains provisional; images blur, fade, and erode rather than crystallising into fixed forms. Whether moving through the detritus of urban space, tracing the emotional sediments of labour, or navigating the porous landscapes of memory, these practices refuse the polished spectacle often demanded of contemporary art.

Instead, what they offer is slower, riskier: a sustained attention to what might otherwise disappear, a commitment to working with and through fragility. In an era dominated by speed, surface, and certainty, MFA graduates this year remind us that there is still quiet defiance – and a different kind of endurance – to be found in assembling something lasting from the scattered, worn materials of experience.

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MFA Degree Show, The Glue Factory, Glasgow, 29 May-8 Jun