Taking a walk around a degree show on your own can be a mixed blessing. On one hand, your senses are alert to the visual onslaught before you;

on the other, you long for company to brainstorm the puzzle the work presents.

Last Friday, a week before this year’s degree show opened to the public, all 45 Gray’s School of Art’s Painting and Contemporary Art Practice (CAP) graduands had vacated the building. Exhausted, no doubt, with the business of boiling four years worth of work into one small degree show.

As I padded through Gray’s airy workrooms and corridors on my tod, it was eerily quiet, save for the odd whirring or disembodied voice emanating from an installation. Not long into my voyage of discovery, the memorable soundscape in CAP student Elsbeth Morrison’s short films – think squelching and church organ music – jolted me out of my solitude. I was thrown headlong into a world of suppurating fruit, worms, pulled teeth and floorboards oozing a blood-like substance. All in a darkened room.

Her work seemed to be asking: Death, where is thy sting?

This theme of decay also cropped up in Ashley Figgis’s work. She has created a whole new genre of art which can be dubbed Tattie Art. Hundreds of sliced and dried potatoes have been turned into a mix of sculptures – both fixed and kinetic. The ones hanging from the rafters worked best. I was less sure about the decrepit tatties which sat forlornly with ancient tubers stretched out in all sorts of odd directions. I recall finding such an “artwork” behind my son’s bed when he was a toddler …

Gray’s School of Art, part of Robert Gordon University, recently came top for art degrees in Scotland and 14th overall in UK in The Guardian’s 2019 university league tables. Disciplines include; painting, fashion and textiles, contemporary art practice, 3D design, communication design and photography.

In this review I am focusing on painting and contemporary art practice, and like the other disciplines, the ethos fostered at Gray’s is collegiate, creative and, at the same time, grounded.

In a valedictory “address” in the painting cohort’s catalogue, outgoing tutor Andy Cranston has this advice for his students: “Hopefully, as an art student, you have lived in an intense present, not looked back too much and not looked too far forward but been immersed in now.”

Ironically, given Cranston’s words, there is a distinct air of nostalgia at Gray’s in both painting and CAP. And then some!

Emma Laing has created an affecting large-scale collage made up of family photographs and flotsam, complemented by beautifully layered prints. I have seen several student shows riffing on the subject of dementia in the last few years but this one is particularly memorable.

Painting student, Elliot Cookson, also looks to family archives for inspiration. His large-scale canvases conjure up a blurry, half-remembered world; naive but controlled.

Elsewhere, Martin Richens describes himself as a “contemporary neo-pop artist”. His boys’ comic-style paintings have a blackly nostalgic twist, turning toys into rockets and plane fuel into an anguished cry spelling out “NOOOOO!” Richens has a real eye for clever detail and colour.

Katie Avey’s off-kilter geometric block-coloured paintings are also informed by memories of a family home. I felt queasy looking at them. Not in a negative way. It’s as though she has grasped a feeling of anxiety and fed that feeling into her painting in all its bold, childlike openness.

Derelict buildings have pulled Samantha Cheevers in the direction of creating a narrative based around abandoned objects and letters. Her small works are dark and heavily glazed. Off-putting at first but then take a closer look and you find all sorts of intrigue.

Ruination has seeped into Jenni Hastie’s work too. Her tiny scrubbed-down rusty metal landscapes are a thing of beauty.

Chris Farrell combines painting and performance (although I didn’t see the latter). His paintings are on the prime position of the first-floor landing. Big and bold, they invoke moments in time from his recent past; a period spent in Govanhill, Glasgow, with a group of friends, known as the Southside Cartel or 744. There’s a fantastic depiction of a tent-filled festival site presided over by gun-metal grey sky. In the foreground, three revellers stand locked in time.

On the ground floor, three shows caught my eye. Jade Gilbert has created the most eye-locking installations in this year’s show. The floor is painted dusky pink while the walls are white. In the middle is a rough circle of white plaster cast dust. Suspended above this is a host of plaster cast objects; a suitcase with a spoon on top, a pair of spectacles, a picture frame and a doll – to name but a few. It works.

Natasha Riddoch looks to the past with her idealised versions of a home, including a spider with chair legs painted pink topped off by gold “feet” and a drippy golden body. Part chair, part homage to Louise Bourgeois, who used spiders as a metaphor for the mother figure, it’s my new art crush.

Finally, I was drawn to the storytelling in Sandy Scott’s show. An installation which purports to “curate” the story of “innovative Scottish artist Joseph Kerr”, Scott brings together strands of a creative life, including his subject’s boiler-suit, workshop tools and ladders, an impressive dry-stane dyke and even a poster from the old Third Eye Centre exhibition in Glasgow. There’s also a booklet about Kerr’s life (1955-2010) and a Wikipedia entry about him. I’d have taken it all as read had I not spotted that Kerr “began a diploma in Sculpture at Glasgow School of Art under head of sculpture, David Harding.”

Having interviewed Harding recently, I knew that couldn’t be right since he told me he arrived in Glasgow to teach in the Environmental Art department in the early 1980s.

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. Nowhere more so than at a degree show near you …

Don't miss

Finding your way around a degree show in any normal year is discombobulating enough – and that’s before you get to the myriad concepts and aesthetics on display in the final year installations themselves – but when the builders are in, as they are at Edinburgh College of Art, it starts to become a little Kafkaesque.
This year’s Fine Art degree show – elsewhere do not miss the Architecture, Design or the Applied Arts degree shows in this final weekend – is the usual ever-expanding platform of disciplines, from the age-old Drawing, Painting and Sculpture to the nebulous Intermedia, although on this showing of cross-disciplinary work, you could be forgiven for thinking it is all intermedia now. 
This year’s show is something of a mixed bag, with some excellent work alongside a number of perhaps muddied concepts, tableaux and mini-worlds, as well as a certain homogeneity of aesthetic in places, sometimes masking the thinking going on behind the work.
I liked Jack Handscombe’s (Fine Art MA) gothic sandcastles, large-scale 
neo-gothic turrets looming out of a tower of sand, and his play on Blake, Newton and Paolozzi – a figure in full racing driver kit hunched over a laptop, with a forest of bamboo sprouting out of his back, as if he had been there for a very long time. 
Taylor Shaw’s (Sculpture BA) video of someone karate-kicking a block of clay into shape brought a welcome laugh. Katherine Russell’s (Sculpture BA) un-functional functional ceramics, left, were also well done. And amongst all the miniature world scenarios, Jessica Gasson’s (MAFA Fine Art) was the most polished, an atmospheric dark room archive of cast moths and fragile fragments, displayed in museum cases, with bat flight patterns engraved, white on black, in panels in the darkened room next door.
Edinburgh College of Art Degree 
Show: Fine Art, Edinburgh College of 
Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, 
0131 651 5800, eca.ed.ac.uk. Sat 
and Sun, 11am-5pm