GSA Degree Show 2025: The Review
From hedonistic hook-ups to the dynamism of Glasgow's streets, the Glasgow School of Art students translate their personal perspectives into painting, film and sculpture
Artists have a unique ability to see beyond the surface of things, able to translate that seeing into newly perceivable forms. The Glasgow School of Art’s class of 2025 is full of such artistic souls.
Douglas Rogerson and Jennifer Aldred, who are graduating from the Master of Fine Art programme, each incorporate overlooked and discarded materials in their respective artworks. Rogerson’s multi-layered prints recall sheets of dilapidated steel, subtly weathered and ghostly. Using monotype and relief printing processes, the surfaces of these large works not only reproduce the tactility of his subject matter – fragments of wood found on the streets of Glasgow – but expose the misted history that can be read in their patina and grain. In this way, Rogerson’s artworks invite us to reflect upon the dynamism of city life, how things change, but more so, what is lost or forgotten in that process.
Similarly, Aldred finds the abstract in materials from the urban world. Positioned in a narrow corridor space, her presentation includes a number of metal push and kick plates – the flat rectangles of metal usually fixed to doors to protect them from damage. Aldred’s plates are far from pristine, each bearing the traces of human activity: greasy finger smears, scratches and remnants of sticky tape. Displayed in pairs, to me, these odd couples allude to the most fleeting of everyday interactions and how mundane devices hold bodies apart.
Graduating from the School of Fine Arts’ Painting & Printmaking BA (Hons) programme, Mia Coutts’s meticulous pastel paintings echo something of Rogerson and Aldred’s sensitivities. Utterly impressionistic, her wide canvases seem to depict mundane aspects of city life glimpsed through a foggy bus window – as hatched lines jazz, I see blocky tenement flats blur into foliage. Coutts’s world is unstable yet grounded in formal lucidity. It seems of note that the two canvases that feature in Coutts’s presentation have been lovingly primed, a preparative step that, much like the Impressionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, makes her subject matter subtly animate.
Working across photography and moving image, Jules Dunn’s work is delicate. I was particularly drawn to their series of well-framed Super 8 stills. Minute in scale and printed in soft tones of white-silver, these images depict moments from everyday life: a body battling with a white sheet, a horse’s ass, far off figures engulfed in a landscape. Walking between these intimate stills, I wonder if they form part of a larger narrative: not a concrete film per se but a memory, or indeed, a series of disparate memories logged in the back of one’s mind.
Memories haunt Marie Autratová’s practice, too. Her minimal installation includes an aged wooden ladder adorned with chintzy pearl buttons, a stool with a fat-frilled pin cushion placed upon it, and a book of poetry penned in both English and Czech (as Google Translate tells me). These works are quietly inviting; the first page in Autratová’s poetic collection makes this intention clear: "The words I cannot speak out loud, / I invite you to read on my behalf." Translated into sculptural forms, Autratová's installation allows us to think about how love and loss, care and conviviality, combine to craft a personal existence.
Solomon Pawlyn pastiches the crafting of a digital existence; specifically, an existence forged on Grindr. Featuring a slack plywood changing booth, video, photography, laser pointers, and a range of bedazzled masks, his multimedia installation, titled Icarus Affection, is rather OTT. Together, this confused meeting of stuff not only relays aspects of Pawlyn’s collaborative research undertaken on Grindr but also materially alludes to the app’s dissociative effect. Toned hot blood red, the looped video resting at the centre of the installation conveys what I mean: here we see a view of a packed night club from above, topless men helplessly gyrating. If the myth of Icarus tells of a young man who, given new resources, flew too close to the sun only to fall towards his death, this film positions the community of Grindr as something risky, two-faced and hedonistic.
Alongside these six artists, GSA’s class of 2025 represent true artistic sensibility. Across the degree show's two sites, the art school’s Stow Building and the Glue Factory, this year’s graduates make their personal perspectives aesthetically engaging.
The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show runs until 8 Jun
online showcase at www.gsashowcase.net