Art review: GSA Degree Show 2024, Glasgow School of Art: 'has to be seen, heard, touched and even occasionally smelled'

The work at this year’s GSA Degree show offers a multi-sensory experience, writes Susan Mansfield

Degree Show 2024, Glasgow School of Art ****

Master of Fine Art, The Glue Factory, Glasgow ****

Of the four main Scottish degree shows, GSA is the biggest with over 600 students across all disciplines, and anyone hoping to see even a fraction of it can expect to wear down some shoe leather.

Black Sheep by Olivia Priya Foster PIC: McAteer Photography

All over the Stow Building, the work of 140-odd Fine Art students (from Painting & Printmaking, Sculpture & Environmental Art and Fine Art Photography) is to be seen, heard, touched and even occasionally smelled.

Sound figures large. Sam Obaid, who came to Glasgow from Syria as a refugee, has built a handmade wooden machine, a kind of expanded music box which cranks out an eerie melody and a ribbon of poignant drawings. Theodora Maclellan combines a branch from a quince tree with two metal drums turning out a percussive soundtrack.

Amy Anna Graham creates domestic objects which make sound when touched. Esther Metcalfe has mixed an analogue sound piece to be played on a couple of dozen Walkmans. Michael Raphael Gilfedder has made an album to accompany his intriguingly surreal paintings. Robyn Bamford has made a series of water flutes, tall ceramic vessels each with its own unique voice, and has filmed them outdoors in watery locations.

Going outside, and bringing the outside back in, is a clear feature of this show, from Olivia Priya Foster’s impressive tents made of shorn fleeces from the family farm to Chema Rodriguez Alcantara’s intricate mosaics of rusted metal and broken pottery.

Metamorphoses by Amy Rose Dixon PIC: ©McAteer Photography

Painting is present, but far from dominant. Hannah Lockey is a vigorous figurative painter: her studies of young people are well worth looking at, and could do with a bit more space. Meghan Josephine highlights elements of female experience by painting large-scale ensembles of women.

Felix Bode captures images from the window of a train or plane by painting quickly, wet-on-wet; his pieces have energy and atmosphere. Lucas Allen’s engagement with painting is more conceptual, making subtle works which hover between between representation and abstraction. Maya McMahon-Boon does something similar with printmaking, alert to the possibilities offered by different techniques and materials.

In photography, a strong seam of work investigates place, family and heritage. Rob Symington’s Where I Used to Live is a candid investigation of Ayrshire towns, from lights of Burger King to the abandoned supermarket trolley. Oran McLeod’s work about Eishken, a sporting estate on the Isle of Lewis from which crofters were cleared in the 1830s, has a bittersweet poetic quality. Mia Gwenllian delicately weaves together material from her Welsh background into work which resists too direct a reading.

Sculpture, too, is strong. Elliot Mountain uses ceramics to create an urban landscape of brutalist trees and slip-cast pigeons. Sarah MacSporran builds mobiles and kinetic pieces in hand-moulded ceramics which beg to be touched. Rebecca Niska works predominantly in wood, balancing colours and shapes, weight and tension. Amy Dixon recycles her clothes, possessions and old art projects into ball-like sculptures which viewers are invited to kick or sit on.

Untitled by Rebecca Niska PIC: ©McAteer Photography

James Arkwright installed a 228-metre-square patchwork of carpet on Kelvin Way and recorded the reactions. Sancia Brimms recreates the Glasgow hairdressers where her parents once worked. Laurie Knott, one of few dedicated filmmakers, has made an impressive 40-minute film about success and failure, and Joe Cameron’s stop motion film is impressive in its detail and philosophical depth.

Meanwhile, the MFA graduates are back at Glue Factory, revelling in its unreconstructed post-industrial space. There are painters here too: Louise Campion’s large-scale paintings of young executives are very good, as are Heeyoung Noh’s nudes, exploring Korean womanhood. Chris Farrell works in paintings and video, inspired by the Caledonian antisyzygy.

Abi Charlesworth is a committed sculptor using a range of materials skilfully and carefully to create work which evokes fossils and archaeological traces. Blake Ballard takes inspiration from the meanings encoded in crochet patterns, working on large and small scales. Jane Skeer tells the stories of women in her family in a strong series of works linked by the common motif of underwear.

Louis Syed-Anderson delves into family history too, exploring memory and fragments of story in a rich and delicate body of work in prints, textiles and found objects. Aaron Alexander Smyth combines some very fine drawing with digital work and objects made from melted down silver. While not giving up their meaning easily, his pieces have a great deal of poise.

Both shows run until 9 June