Art reviews: Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2025 | Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2025

The best work in this year’s degree shows marries clear vision, skilled application and effective presentation, writes Susan Mansfield

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, Stow Building, Glasgow ★★★★

Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art ★★★★

Glasgow School of Art is the biggest of Scotland’s art schools, and this year’s graduating cohort feels bigger than ever, with over 160 graduates on Fine Art courses. The fifth floor of the Stow building has been commandeered for the first time for this year’s Degree Show, to give more exhibition space.

For the visitor, it is something of a mountain to climb, the incentive being that each new studio space offers something different from the one before, a new creative voice with something to say about the world. With so many students, it is harder to stand out from the crowd, but the best work marries clear vision, skilled application and effective presentation.

Line Up by Gabriella Burns at the GSA Degree Show 2025 | GSA / courtesy of the artist

Painting has made a resurgence across the Degree Shows this year, and GSA is no exception. Esther Douglas is a fine portrait painter, capturing the spirit of her sitters and bringing them together in a book, Letters to Glasgow, where they are invited to write about their relationship with the city.

Kyle Blain has made a commitment to exploring working-class culture and paints mainly with emulsion. His Common People series captures moments, family interactions and a sense of place. Evelyn Munro is doing something similar with aristocrats; her ambitious, large-scale paintings depict a family of eccentrics in their mansion.

Gabriella Burns is interested in the male gaze on young women. She uses the repetitiveness of uniforms to create semi-abstract images where faces are hidden and individuality minimised. Isla Nicholson works in pure abstraction inspired by the experience of live music; her airbrush paintings pulsate with colour. Mary Lydon, who is from Ukraine, builds up complex patterns using traditional and contemporary symbols to explore personal and cultural trauma.

Several students have undertaken ambitious building projects which require technical as well as artistic skills. Florence MacLennan’s tin chapel is a thing of beauty, a quiet devotional space which feels both freshly made and as though it had existed for centuries. She has decorated the walls with frescos which pay tribute to the unseen hands of artists and craftspeople through time.

The Sun is Low by Mary Lydon at the GSA Degree Show 2025 | GSA / Courtesy of the artist

Ethan Logan has built an immaculate recreation of a Chinese restaurant, right down to the smell of five spice, and plans to cook there at times during the show. Harry Boulton’s I Lost My Keys is a sealed environment which captures an unsettling range of domestic objects, some of which move mechanically. Conor Browne has built a large and complex machine which generates its own soundscape.

Maha Al Yousefi has a sophisticated sculptural voice working on both large and small scales, using figurative language to explore strength and fragility, what is concealed and revealed. Also from Syria, Medeni Yanat has created a complete sensory environment - including smell - in which a kinetic sculpture sends shadow figures dancing across the walls.

Morfo Nikita’s work is about the military partition of Cyprus, inviting visitors to watch a film, Life on the Other Side, through gun holes in a wall constructed of oil barrels and sandbags. Closer to home, Ellis Bairstow has made Vertical Glasgow, an impressive installation of photographs of the city’s tower blocks displayed on light boxes, charting their history from utopian affordable housing to demolition as slums. Thomas Main has made some exquisite photographs of the ageing male body.

Claire Duquesne’s photography looks at Scotland as an island nation through the eyes of an artist from the Pacific Northwest who has made the country her home. Oli Turner explores ancient sites, and builds monoliths which become containers for intricately constructed objects. Orla Bradie is a dedicated printmaker who explores the Scottish landscape through its ruins and drystone walls.

Identity, home, and the experiences which form us is always a theme at degree shows, with some sophisticated examples here: Sol Pawlyn explores his experience as a young man on Grindr in Icarus Affection; Alexandra Smart delves into aspects of her Welsh and Scottish identities with humour and affection, using ceramics and printed tea towels; Kristine Haritonova, who is from Latvia, creates a charming “snail trail” with ceramic snails and her mother’s lace knitting. Aoife Hogan’s home is by the sea and she depicts the ocean thoughtfully and inventively using glass and sculpted paper.

One could go on: Veronica Mee’s textile hangings; Emma Nicol’s beautifully constructed (not to mention funny) board game, Stagger Hame; Lauren Smith, who has reproduced the features of a hotel room in cloth. But there is much to see, and one must always move on.

Specifically, that means moving on to Edinburgh College of Art, which is presenting over 100 graduates in Fine Art. While GSA allocates each student a subdivision of space a bit like a chicken coop, ECA invites students to curate their own rooms, selecting those with whom they’d like to show. The effect is less relentless on the viewer, and sometimes highly effective.

Here, painting dominates particularly strongly, with nearly half the year’s cohort committed to the brush; they have even got together to produce their own painting catalogue.

With so many painters, it becomes possible to see clearly the range of ways in which the students are using the medium across style, scale and subject matter. Hattie Quigley’s work is about women and food, although the subject is secondary to the ambition, scale and energy of her pictures. Her biggest is the size and shape of an altarpiece, with light cascading down through it. Alyssa Atkinson works at the opposite end of the scale, capturing moments of everyday life in paintings the size of coasters.

Painting at degree shows can diverge greatly in quality, so seeing a wide range of students committed to developing serious painting chops is a joy. Finlay Trevor paints farming and fishing in the North-west Highlands in a traditional style. Ella Williams manages to paint what memories feels like: people, places and objects which emerge and recede in gorgeous pastel tones. Esther Forse has a realist style and paints places with a disconcerting artificiality to them - model villages and film sets - each with their own brand of trouble in paradise.

Ella Markell leans more towards a kind of symbolism, working instinctively and removing paint as well as adding it, creating images weighted with meaning. Tash Runciman’s work is cinematic and colourful, her figures often captured in moments of distraction or private communication. Amy McLean’s Seeing Double series brings together pairs of images with a thematic or visual connection.

Tank by Elene Sturua | Stewart Attwood

Elene Sturua is from Georgia, a country with its own troubled politics, and her paintings have a touch of the surreal about them as well as evoking the flat, steppe landscape. Amy Val Sema digs into her Albanian heritage, picking out elements of that country’s history from its independence in 1912 to its rebirth as a Communist dictatorship. Alexandra Winton’s dreamy paintings plunder memories of growing up in the Philippines.

Brynn Byers’ “speedscapes” are half-abstract, as if glimpsed from the window of a speeding train, a comment on how we often absorb things - or fail to - in over-busy lives. Connor Scott, has devised a kind of anti-painting, making marks on the walls by pressing colour into them, producing fresco-like palimpsests which makes me think of all the layers of painting these studios have witnessed over the years.

Detail from one of Brynn Byers' "speedscapes" at ECA | Stewart Attwood

There is plenty going on among the non-painters too. Jackie Gibb’s installation of laundry on washing lines blackened with charcoal is about how political actions create traumas which play out in the domestic realm. Laura Compton uses materials like insulation, steel wool and silicone to create beings which erupt into the space from the walls and floors of the building itself.

Kristel Bodensiek has a sophisticated grasp of materials, making a screen of diamond shaped pieces of glass and a fountain in which clay coins gradually disintegrate. Freya Glass paints with materials such as coffee on old bedsheets, and places her painting work in dialogue with carefully placed sculptures made of found materials. Elena Gadd’s The Funeral invites viewers to stand inside big suspended masks to listen to voices around the coffin: one gossips, another simply weeps.

Alyssa Miller has made 1001 origami cranes from family photographs, speaking to Japanese and Hawaiian traditions; they look great hanging above the main stairwell. Beyond these are the impressive banners created by Ishrat Rahim, from her photographs. Abbie Stewart uses photos from the family archive too, but collages them with found images and prints in her own laser-cut frames.

As at the other degree shows, film is sparse, though those who use it are ambitious: Bobby Lamond’s animation Benny in Blunderland uses Disney-style animation, stop-motion animation, found footage and family holiday films to explore the loss of innocence. Immersive work is rare too, but Ione Jenkins’ installation of paintings, cushions and glowing snowdrops is a beautiful place to be. Three degree shows into the season, it would be a pleasing place to rest awhile.

The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show runs until 8 June, with an online showcase at www.gsashowcase.net; the Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show runs until 6 June, with an online showcase at www.graduateshow.eca.ed.ac.uk