RSA New Contemporaries, Edinburgh review: 'not a quiet exhibition'

RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

Christopher Wood: Ancient Songs, Kilmorack Gallery, near Beauly ★★★★

Once more, the galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy resound with the accumulated talent of a cohort of emerging artists for RSA New Contemporaries: 63 of them, selected from the 2024 degree shows at Scotland’s five art schools. And I use the word “resound” advisedly; this is not a quiet exhibition. But more on that later. Many graduates are showing elements of their degree show work: some have focussed down, selecting and honing; a few have made new work.

For most, the shift from a studio-turned-gallery in an art school to the wide open spaces of the RSA has been a positive one. There’s a welcome sense that everything has room to breathe after last year’s herculean show which covered two cohorts and performed a vital act of post-pandemic catching up.

The large spaces allow big works, such as Olivia Priya Foster’s Black Sheep, two immense tents constructed from black fleeces from Foster’s family’s farm in Argyll, to take on properly monumental proportions. But for all its scale, the work is highly personal: it’s the artist’s response to growing up queer and mixed race in rural Scotland.

Installation view of RSA New Contemporaries 2025 | Julie Howden

Many artists starting out in their careers make highly personal work, but it’s also a mark of maturity when the work takes on a life beyond that. There’s no doubt, for example, that Jen Meldrum’s work is rooted in a personal experience of trauma, but in this show her figurative sculpture and plaster reliefs take on another life, calling to mind Renaissance marble figures as well as the forensic analysis of a crime scene.

Calder Mackay’s paintings come from a personal place too, looking like versions of family photographs, although his larger project is a study of masculinity. A sense of loss gives this body of work additional heft. Lola Pilkington works with pattern and layering, mirroring the way memory can work. Amy Odlum’s close-up studies of her father during his last illness are as striking now as they were in her degree show.

Both Agnes Roberts and Will Dutton use painting to explore the image and information overload in contemporary life. Dutton’s pictures are large and use colour and composition to create a sense of unease which is dream-like. Roberts’ collages of images, themselves collaged on a large wall, feel like a personal pin board, an attempt to hold onto precious moments amid a wash of data and experiences.

A number of artists are working with pattern. Tallulah Batley’s meticulously constructed Pink Parlour is a kind of human-sized doll’s house (which also has a fully furnished doll’s house inside it). Pattern and decoration are her tools for digging deeper. Fern Lovande uses pattern and printed fabric to talk about labour, and take issue with Clement Greenberg.

Nafs, by Shiza Saqib | Contributed

Shiza Saqib’s delicate lace-like patterns, made both with drawing and stitching on large blue backdrops, are a kind of mindfulness practice, combining her Eastern roots, Sufi psychology and her experience as a yoga teacher. Jillian Lee Adamson’s outstanding embroidery pieces, which resemble cell structures or even galaxies, are the results of another deliberately slow practice, and are beautifully installed and lit. Kitty Yarrow’s excellent drawings capturing patterns of fern leaves are an embodiment of the human connection to nature and a healing practice in a time of grief.

Sound was a key element in the 2024 degree shows, and this exhibition is far from quiet, from Coire Simpson’s sound installation which makes the roar of traffic on the M8 sound like waves of an aggressive sea, to Adrienne Murray’s group of porcelain megaphones fed with tree roots and broadcasting a subtle ambient soundscape. I’d turn Simpson’s down a few notches and Murray’s up a few, but that might be just me. Amy Anna Graham has built sound devices activated by touch from the audience.

The unspoken, seen by Adrienne Murray | Contributed

Ewan Douglas takes a long, hard look at Scotland in his tongue-in-cheek installation, Albaland, pointing to the underside of the shortbread-tin image: a revolving Methadone sign, a giant paper bag complete with grease stains, and a posse of highland cows huddling round their Buckfast bottles. Lewis Cavinue, another stand-out from Duncan of Jordanstone, has made a new work, Mile, taking literally the invitation from the proverb to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, whether or not they fit.

Niamh Finnigan’s model village turns out to be a rundown town centre, complete with To Let signs, boarded up shops, a generic pub (The Red Lion Crown Swan Arms) and a homeless person asleep under a bench. Little ceramic people go about their business amid the devastation. Bethany Reid’s installation contrasts the childhood view of pigs with the truth about their place in the food chain. Refined and focussed since her degree show, it contains some excellent textile work.

Christian Sloan has made new work, continuing his degree show theme of working with sculptural materials which will outlive us and making suns from oxidising copper sheeting, and Justine Watt won the Glenfiddich Award, the biggest prize offered at the show, for work made from old wooden chair legs. She has bent and fixed the wood using traditional techniques like steam-bending and kerfing into giant rings speak of her former life in the circus.

It’s a show in which detail and skill is as important as scale. Mia Gwenlian’s collages of paper and stitching made from old books are beautifully evocative; Felix Bode’s small paintings inspired by the Berlin underground are intriguing and understated; Aimie Harding’s ceramic seed pods and Olivia Sinclair’s stop-motion animation both demonstrate skill and perseverance in very different disciplines. It’s a solid show, from a cohort of artists with plenty of interesting ideas, less sensationalism than some, but perhaps more staying power.

Until 16 April