Young Team: RSA New Contemporaries 2025 preview

How are emerging artists and architects responding to generation-defining moments such as technological advances, climate catastrophe and shifting cultural identities? Every year, RSA New Contemporaries provides a window into how Scotland’s most promising art school graduates are forging their creative perspectives and distinctive styles. Now in its sixteenth edition, the showcase offers an incisive look at the themes shaping contemporary art. Running alongside it is Delia Baillie: Memory Box, a heartfelt homage to the late Dundonian artist and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design lecturer, whose influence continues to shape Scotland’s artistic landscape.

Raised on a sheep farm in rural Argyll, Olivia Priya Foster creates sculptural habitats from the raw materials of her upbringing. Black Sheep began as an autobiographical performance, in which Foster sheared sheep on her family farm. Using the sheepskin, Foster has created a cave-like installation that serves as a documentation of performance. Through a POC lens, Foster excavates her experience of queer rurality, navigating the duality of her Scottish and South Asian identities. This is a deeply personal interrogation of the land she grew up on and her diasporic heritage. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Foster’s 2024 presentation of Black Sheep won her the ‘Best in School’ title at the degree show and a nomination for the Visual Arts Scotland Graduate Award.

Similarly engaged with place and personal history, Jennifer Upson repurposes found materials from her home in The Necessity of Ruins, a work that suggests renewal in the wake of upheaval. Upson began her Fine Art studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands during what she describes as a “turning point” in her life. For this site-specific work, she dismantled and reassembled a wooden lathe stripped from her 200-year-old cottage on the Moray Coast, revealing the hidden framework of home. Once discarded, these architectural fragments find new meaning, reflecting Upson’s process-led approach to change, memory and reconstruction.

We Love the Country, still from performance. Credit: Ahed Alameri.

Madeleine Marg turns her gaze to the all-consuming presence of technology. Her installations expose the algorithmic grip responsible for brain rot and diminishing human-to-human connection. For her Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) degree show, she presented DINNERS READY, but nobody is listening, an unsettling installation depicting a dismembered family at the dinner table, doomscrolling rather than communicating with each other. In her latest work, Marg casts the most vulnerable of subjects in her installations: a baby. In Ipad Baby, we watch the baby – seemingly the artist herself – grow up disinterested in the non-virtual world. The colour is drained from everything except the glowing screens, lit up like a dopamine hit, pacifying the baby for hours on end. As Marg edges closer to reality, her world-building is no longer dystopian – it is disturbingly familiar.

Also hailing from DJCAD, Rowan Roscher’s practice is shaped by feminist philosophies, body politics and science fiction. For inspiration, she returns to Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction which makes the case that the vessel was the first human tool, rather than a weapon. For Roscher, bodies themselves are vessels – vessels that are vulnerable, exploited, yet capable of resistance. Her ceramics confront the anxieties surrounding wellness misinformation and healthcare access inequality, using playfulness and softness as a counterbalance.

Questions of authorship are posed in Ahed Alameri’s participatory performance THESEUS I. The Emirati multimedia artist and Edinburgh College of Art graduate invites visitors to inscribe charcoal writing on the RSA’s walls, in turn blurring the lines between authorship and ownership. Inspired by the Ship of Theseus paradox, which questions whether an object remains the same if all its parts are replaced, Alameri probes national identity and the mutability of historical narratives. Who gets to write the past, and who decides what is erased?

High Density Living, Digital Painting. Credit: Brendan Kerrisk.

As climate collapse looms, Brendan Kerrisk envisions an alternative to unchecked economic growth. Rejecting architecture’s complicity in environmental destruction, the University of Dundee alumnus instead mobilises its revolutionary potential. His intricate digital illustration, High Density Living, depicts an autonomous settlement in Germany’s post-industrial Ruhr Valley, emblazoned with the slogan ‘WORK LESS, LIVE MORE’. This speculative intervention also expresses the conflict and guilt Kerrisk feels with the realisation that, as he puts it: “As I enter my professional life, I am certain that, despite any intentions, my work will, at best, be an act of environmental amelioration.”

Similarly cynical about humans' destructive impact, Bethany Reid explores the moral quandaries of human-animal relationships, her sculptures challenging societal perceptions of non-human animals. When You’re Big is a cutting dissection of meat production, using contrasting materials and stylistic approach to distinguish between childhood innocence and the harsh reality of adulthood. Impaled and screeching pigs – stitched together from discarded fabrics – stand as haunting symbols of cruelty and complicity. Through a visceral juxtaposition, Reid confronts her viewers with the ethical dilemmas embedded in everyday choices of consumption.

Following RSA New Contemporaries, one exceptional emerging artist will be awarded The Skinny Prize. As their career progresses within the Scottish arts scene, we’ll soon share a close look at the recipient’s practice.

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RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh, 22 Mar-16 Apr, £8(£5), free Mondays