Art review: Degree Show 2024, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee

Painting dominates at this year’s Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show, writes Susan Mansfield

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design Degree Show, Crawford and Matthew Buildings, Dundee ****

As usual, Scotland’s degree show season kicks off in Dundee as more than 400 students across art and design disciplines celebrate their emergence into the world. Among those in fine art subjects, painting dominates – after some years in the doldrums – in a show with comparatively little large sculpture or film.

There are too many painters to mention them all, however, Calder Mackay’s large-scale works which explore masculinity by looking at the subtle interactions between men and women are particularly good. Thomas Houlihan paints expressive, timeless figures in scenes which feel shot through with sadness.

Installation view of work by Caulder Mackay in the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show PIC: DJCAD

Amy Odlum is another superb painter. She is one of the few to eschew large-scale work, painting with tightly cropped, hyperreal studies of her father in his final illness. Carrie Doherty paints grief, too, incorporating her father’s ashes into paintings which subvert imagery from her Catholic upbringing.

Many students have thought hard about how to present their work: Sophie Duncan’s voyeuristic photographs are displayed in window-frame light boxes; Alexander Harrow has created an old man’s pub to show his paintings; Georgia-Lee Keir’s excellent drawings, inspired by her job as a bartender, are presented on a bar top.

Madeleine Marg creates an immersive installation, Dinner’s Ready but Nobody is Listening, to explore the endless distraction of the mobile phone, an all-white dining table surrounded by blaring screens of scrolling content. Rowan Roscher uses various media to dive deep into the subject of navel-gazing, the relationship with the stomach and with food.

Olivia Sinclair’s stop-motion film is a superbly detailed study of teenage ennui and the gradual dawning of self-awareness. Naia Ammane’s film, Icarus Retold, is also a study of youth, an ambitious blending of moving image, monologue and choreography. Robin Scanlan documents her socially engaged practice, which included opening a community plant shop in Dundee’s Keiller Centre.

River of One Thousand Pots, by Madeline Farquhar

Ewan Douglas examines Scottish identity with his Albaland theme park – his pow-wow of six-foot tall highland cows, surrounded by Buckfast and Irn Bru bottles, are being used to advertise the Degree Show. Keira McGuire confronts Scottish stereotypes with a similar playfulness using alphabetti spaghetti.

Self-declared working-class voices – rare in art schools, and, one fears, getting rarer as funding diminishes – are strong here. Ava Wright’s photographs of Paisley offer a slice of life without celebration or judgment, while Brooke Milliken confronts the experience of being working-class in Edinburgh in a well-made film.

Lewis Cavinue works principally in performance, but has translated his ethos of personal bafflement very well into a series of life-size sculptural figures with their heads buried in books, on the floor, hanging upside down, sitting on a toilet.

Several students have immersed themselves in print-making. Aoife Cawley has made an impressive series, The Land of Saints and Scholars, bringing the mythology of Ireland and the Book of Kells into the 21st century. Fern Lovande takes on Clement Greenberg’s essay on The Avant-garde and Kitsch in an energetic, inventive show celebrating pattern.

Alana Ashby’s small kinetic sculptures about the human condition are well-made and self-assured. Jen Meldrum’s work about sexual assault is brave and imaginative. Ceramics continue to feature in a number of shows, notably Kristina Gondova’s impressive pieces inspired by landscapes and Madeline Farquhar’s beautiful River of One Thousand Pots.

These students began their courses in the pandemic, but only one reflects this in their work: Alyssia Smith’s portraits of people wearing masks capture emotions in the eyes, the trauma of that time, and the residual anger.