Art review: Young at art

BE INSPIRED! DEGREE SHOW 2009

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EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART

DEGREE SHOW 2009

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GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART

EDINBURGH College of Art celebrated its centenary last year, though in fact the College didn't move into its building until January 1909. The college itself was not new then, however. It incorporated the Trustees Academy. The students, many of the staff and even the curriculum of the older institution continued in the new and so, as the Trustees Academy goes back to 1761, its heir, the college, has its 250th anniversary coming up, making it as the oldest art teaching institution in the country. The Trustees Academy was founded as a school of design, however, and true to that tradition, craft, design and otherwise useful skills were a priority in the early history of the modern college. The city which took responsibility for it for the first 50 years of its existence was very conscious of the economic benefit they could bring.

The college gradually lost sight of its origins, however, but now whether or not because of that tradition, design has recently been greatly enlarged. Applied art, fashion and textiles and visual communication are all brought together and the latter itself incorporates graphic design, film, photography, animation and illustration. To mark this change, in this year's degree show fashion has been put centre stage and given the star spot in the Sculpture Court, although on the day I was there you had to imagine it. The Sculpture Court was filled with a parade of naked tailor's dummies escorted, a little strangely, by clothed figures, but in theatrical costume. The actual fashion had gone to London for the student fashion shows, but the work of theatrical design students had stayed behind. Work in some of the other branches of design is on view in Evolution House. The work in illustration is especially notable.

The more familiar Fine Art area now includes the oddly named Intermedia – formerly tapestry, although nobody had made tapestry there for a long time. In the studios, sculptor Chandra Casali-Bell's work is outstanding. She works with light itself, using transparency, white surfaces and reflection to induce exquisite colour effects. At the centre of the studio a large work, made jointly with fellow student Rebecca Liu, consists of ribbons of transparent material hanging over reflecting pools of water. It catches the light from the high windows and plays with it. Painter Jennifer Harmer uses massed sheets of yellow painted paper hanging loosely in front of the studio window to do something a little similar.

Kirstyn Cameron and Catriona Reid both explore light, space and perspective, but looking inward into a constructed word of parallax and refraction, not out towards the wider world. Stefanie Ferguson is a sculptor who makes strange objects that are at once exquisite and surreal. With more than a nod to Man Ray, for instance, a porcelain toad emerges from a hairy bed-pan. Tobias Hulton is another surrealist, but he works in bronze. He has made a miniature staircase that goes nowhere and a wonderful, tiny dreamworld ladder. Catherine Payton takes apparently ordinary things and then weaves strange stories around them. A cheese plant on a stand, we learn, is not just a cheese plant, but a certain Claire Pecker who sadly underwent an irreversible metamorphosis in a magic contest. You wonder what happened to a figure draped in a sheet hanging behind the door – an unfortunate examiner perhaps? Charlotte Nieuwenhuys also tells stories, but in lively paintings and drawings. Charles Anderson is a painter whose energetic work successfully combines comic book imagery with classic forms and abstraction. His work recalls Rauschenberg without being simply derivative.

Many students document things they have done or aspects of their lives. Thorunn Bjornsdottir uses paintings and rather beautiful casts to chart the evolving life on the newly created volcanic island of Surtsey. Sarah Muirhead paints rather good portraits of people she has met casually and documents something of their lives. She has just been selected to show in the window of Selfridges in Oxford Street. Sam Connor is from Northern Ireland and his construction of ironing boards reflects a tragic event that touched his family in the Troubles there. Rachel MacLean creates a temple of Scottish kitsch. It is, she says, "nauseatingly positive and cheerfully grotesque." I can't quarrel with that.

In Edinburgh before you enter the college Jake Rusby has put an enormous (fake) rock over the door. In Glasgow the equivalent is a handsome abstraction of a bike chained to the railings by sculptor George Thompson. Inside though, while Edinburgh sticks to the territorial demarcations of the different disciplines, Glasgow muddles them all up. Sometimes this does make it difficult to be absolutely certain who has done what, though the arrangement is probably realistic enough.

Any technical distinction in the actual work has long since disappeared. As you enter the Mackintosh building, the stairwell is filled with a tower made by Caroline Skinner. You go in and and look up into a gloomy vertiginous space full of lights and groping hands with a face looking down from the very top. GSA tends to put its stars in the Mackintosh Gallery. Isabel Arbelaez's photographs seem casual, but are actually rather beautifully made. Eleanor Royle recycles boards from the windows of derelict buildings to make prints that record their appearance.

Some of the results work rather well as simple images without knowing this complex hidden narrative. Yaun Wang is a star painter this year. He paints big vigorous pictures that seem to mix western classicism with comic book realism. I can't say I found them really persuasive, but, elsewhere, I did find Stuart Roberts's collages very beautiful. He makes small scissored cuttings and assembles them into strange, imprecise but powerfully suggestive images. Michael Lacy's paintings are more simply narrative, though it is never a simple narrative. They suggest unknown fairytales. Louis Guy paints in the manner of Brueghel and Goya, but while his scenes of mayhem are amusing, they do also reveal how essential the discipline of drawing now is that should underpin such images.

Jennifer White seems to work mostly in collage, but when she paints, her work is sensitive and intriguing. Sarah Wright's collaged Renaissance women are elegant and rather beautiful, however stern their feminist message. Sam Indlovu reflects, not altogether solemnly on the burden of black history, nicely summarised in a boat back-pack: a boat for the slave trade and a back pack for the historical burden it represents.

Lois Whitehead records snaps of conversation and then inscribes them on mugs, symbols of social moments, but her idea of an Ex-exchange might prove a more successful enterprise. Full marks for initiative goes to Harriet Lowther. It is not quite clear what it has to do with her career as a photographer, but she wrote 200 letters warmly to thank companies whose products or services she uses. They range from Ikea, through Clarins and Ryanair to Hartley's Jam. She got replies from half of them. The replies of the astonished customer service departments are sometimes quite touching in their bewildered gratitude. "We never get to hear from the happy customers, only the unhappy ones," wrote the representative of Subway.

Natalie Feather is also a photographer, but her main work is an extraordinary drawing of the face of a cliff, extraordinary because she hung off the cliff to do it. There are pictures of her and she doesn't even seem to have a rope.

Her show also includes some rather beautiful pictures of blank, white sky. For the opposite effect of sheer blackness, Georgina Errington's black paintings cannot be surpassed, but in fact their glossy, oily surface is rather beautiful. Finally, in the McLellan Galleries, now an extension of the GSA, James Halsall has built a shrine, apparently to all major religions, but inside there is just a single chair facing a mirror. Maybe it is all just in your head.