DJCAD Degree Show 2025: The Review

Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design has once again opened its doors for its annual undergraduate Degree Show, featuring the work of over 450 students. 

Graduates across Fine Art and Art and Philosophy appear to be feeling their way through the courses’ scope for multidisciplinarity via a vast range of approaches, with issues surrounding the digital age, climate, and cultural heritage at the forefront of many minds. There is a clear concern with wayfinding through a new age of AI and an ever-shifting cultural landscape, as many graduates lean into common threads of tactility and texture, contrasting subject matter, and questions surrounding the self.

Tucked at the top of the Cooper Gallery stairwell, a tranquil scene of horses unfolds, projected large across one wall. This is a short film, developed in collaboration with Kossa Studio and Live and Breathe Horses by Claire Marion Black, responding to the artist’s sculptural work, also on display. Contextualised by research surrounding Ashvamedha and other traditional Vedic rituals, the work explores notions of time, habitat, and the language of ‘inner-nature’.

Approaching nature from a different angle, Malachy McCrimmon has taken over one end of the Cooper Gallery with an installation of 2D works that somehow jump out from the wall with a sculptural, or rather animated, quality. Filled with polarising imagery, the work behaves like a cacophony of post-internet noise and pixelated birdsong. Though purely visual, composed of paintings and laser-engraved wooden panels, it has the effect of something that sings. Reminiscent of digital doomscrolling, the installation forms a pop-up ad-like overload of visual information. It features dolphins, anime girls, eagles catching drones and laughing face emoticons, and amounts to a captivating display concerned with the technical errors of the modern and natural world.

A twisted pastel dreamscape comprises the work of Millie Stewart. A constructed room of softened spikes and shining surfaces, Stewart has built an immersive site of the sickly sweet, but with an undeniable edge. The work speaks to juxtapositions between childhood and adulthood, embracing a darkness within the everyday through a piece that places childlike ceramics beside sharper metal forms, suggesting something of violence or control, creating a strange scene of opposing forces.

The viewer is asked to rely on other senses in the work of Leah Macmillan (pictured), who has responded to familial experiences of blindness with a body of work intended to be felt rather than seen. Below a sign reading "Please Touch the Art !!" are pairs of blackout glasses, and beside them, braille panels offering tangible translation. The works, mounted like paintings, range from squishy and inviting to rough and porous. As one moves along the walls, scraping, sliding, and stroking displays of bulbous cotton, twisting fibres, and other less discernible materials, a thought-provoking approach to creating work accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences begins to unfold.

Also stepping away from traditional boundaries between artwork and audience, Mia Vidman invites viewers to sit beside skeins of crimson yarn, used to form an installation of crocheted letters suspended between two speakers playing violin music from both Balkan and Scottish cultures. The music, played by Vidman and their mother, explores ideas around genetic inheritance, neurodiversity, and cultural overlap. The crocheted phrases cast shadows that introduce movement and life to the work, which is filled with references to protection and details attentive to Balkan traditions, such as woven burdock-pattern belts made to hold and protect the yarn.

DJCAD Degree Show work by Mia Vidman.

James Ryan Ross has forged a site seemingly suited for pilgrimage, drawn from an interest in ancient sites and standing stones, but instead featuring football paraphernalia. Surrounded by an energy where one might expect Pictish symbols and ancient engravings, we are instead met with discarded football strips and Tennent’s cans, strewn across an astroturf floor that supports a suggested stone archway. This makeshift prehistoric site, composed of contemporary reference, frames a monitor playing The Battle of Dun Nechtain, a film documenting a performance piece reenacting the 685 AD battle between the Picts and the Northumbrians.

Overall, this year’s graduates present a promising group of artists, each uniquely concerned with situating their work within contexts that increasingly shape our understanding of the world and our relationship with a shifting artistic landscape where notions of technology, nature, and collectivity exist in flux.

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Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Undergraduate Degree Show 2025, Matthew & Crawford Buildings, Perth Rd, Dundee, until 1 Jun

dundee.ac.uk/graduate-showcase