Art review: ECA Degree Show 2024, Edinburgh College of Art - 'a note of angst seems to echo through some of the work'
ECA Degree Show 2024, Edinburgh College of Art ****
Normally students at art college would work together in studios throughout their careers, but because of lockdown, those graduating this year had to spend their first year working alone at home and so missed a whole year of that vital collective experience. Those in the five-year MFA degree missed more. Perhaps this explains a note of angst that seems to echo through some of the work by almost a hundred graduates in the ECA Degree Show. Esther Castle’s paintings of frightened figures, for instance, are trapped behind a fence in her installation, while a ladder – means of escape and symbol of aspiration – has broken rungs. Elsie Shields paints people in black and white but all their faces are out of focus. Maciej Kosc uses paint, earth and vegetation to create monstrous creatures lurking just beneath the tidy grass of our suburban lawns. There are some very similar monsters in Micheal Gao’s paintings, too. Valentina Crolla’s paintings, although beautifully executed, seem to be of actual nightmares in a claustrophobic, painted world. One naked figure, pursued by black birds, is watched by eyes in the carpet.
Cleo Stoutzker’s dark paintings of terrified people suggest she is haunted by the violence of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Lucy Kitchin’s work also has echoes of war, but in medieval guise. She has created helmets and spiky objects reminiscent of armour, but has also given them for company the fierce face of the Green Man. It is not all so dark though. Astrid Wigand lets paint flow on sheets of unstretched canvas and then stitches the pieces together to create tranquil, abstract images.
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Hide AdGender issues are always a topic and seem to inspire both Moz Hodnett’s strange green compositions and Ava Brimilcombe’s beautiful, almost Pre-Raphaelite paintings of girls catching an unearthly light in green, garden landscapes. But the most striking image on this theme is provided by Fiona Rose-Leonard with a set of painted conch shells with female figures half emerging from them like hermit crabs. A wonky dressing table in Barbie pink is also striking. Lynn Mai’s empty body suits hanging like human skins also make a pretty telling image, while, with a small art gallery of her own, Tallulah Batley excoriates the representation of women in classic art. On an adjacent theme, Tazmin Lucas reflects on the contrast between such quaint old-fashioned methods of courtship as postcards and bouquets of flowers and modern methods portrayed in hectic images of faces and hands.
The eloquent echoes of classical sculpture in a set of plasters by Endre Fabian are unexpected in this context. There are other things, too, that are simply beautiful like Georgia Boardman’s blocks of cast glass, or Laura Jane Hegarty’s lovely cyanotype clock, capturing in white on blue the image of her own body lying on the floor through the 12 hours of the day.
A pot like a giant, encrusted limpet shell by Carina Lucas is magnificent, while Jillian Lee Adamson’s Metaphorical Cells, extraordinary filigree webs of knotting, stitching and crochet are also very beautiful. Indeed stitching, knotting and plaiting recur as a theme throughout the show. Fiona Goss, for instance, has plaited a belt up a full-size model palm tree. Carys Reynolds has plaited string whose individual elements add up to the two-and-a-half miles of the Roseburn Path that she documents. In a crazy take on office culture, Rosa Doran has stitched the writing on piles of post-it notes, while Anna Avery has embroidered in close detail the surface of digital prints of her paintings. Perhaps this focus on such precise, close-focus tasks is another echo of anxiety, but the results can nevertheless be spectacularly beautiful, as they are in Shiza Saqib’s exquisite Urdu texts, minutely embroidered in white on blue.
Until 9 June