Gray's School of Art Degree Show 2026 review: 'A bumper year'
There is a particularly broad spectrum of media in use in this year’s supersized Gray’s Degree Show, writes Susan Mansfield
Aberdeen’s art school is the last of Big Four to unveil its graduate showcase, andin terms of numbers it’s a bumper year, with nearly 60 students now working under the single banner of Fine Art.
Quite a number of them are still weaving together the various strands of their practice and learning how to display the results. And, as at the other art schools this year, there is comparatively little sculptural work and film. However, there is still plenty of interesting work to enjoy.
It’s always a pleasure to see the work of a student who has found their voice and knows what they want to do with it. Jessica Archibald shows a fine grasp of satire and absurdity with the character she has created, racing driver Trumpton Donaldo. She has built a racing car, a rocket and an Egyptian-style sarcophagus for him, all using the visual language of the tampon, and she’s no slouch at painting either.
Krisztina Safrany is a sculptor who is interested in built structures. She creates hollow concrete blocks, stacked together to resemble high-rises, and furnishes them with ceramic interiors, using an abstracted sculptural language of shapes and colours to make the point that people occupy space in different ways, even if the space is the same.
Women artists addressing sexism and misogyny has been a theme across all the shows this year, and Tiana Palepoi does it particularly well here through satirical magazine covers, advertisements (“Lobotomy, honey? Can’t have all that thinking getting in the way of my chores”), newspapers, and even a range of clothing.
Gray’s can usually be relied upon to produce some good painters, and this year is no exception. I particularly enjoyed Tabitha McDonald’s figurative painting and drawing, looking at childhood and adulthood and the grey area in between. Fraser Lei, also working with painting, drawing and printmaking, on the theme of The Unreal City, fuses elements of architecture with the human form.
Connor Meighan’s paintings look at navigating relationships and the longing for companionship which can lie behind hedonistic sexuality. Eva Wright works on a large scale, drawing in ink. Her strong, confident lines explore human and animal forms, working with what intrigues and what repulses. Kate Stratford’s drawings capture the glamour of 1920s Hollywood.
Lily Moody’s subtle paintings concentrate on light and shadow. It takes a certain amount of courage to focus down on the light falling on a flight of steps, or the shadow cast by ornamental railings, and she does this beautifully. Thalia Macmillan picks up on the details of the ordinary, too, in a monochrome palette: the star at the base of a swivel chair, a billowing curtain.
Delaney Fairweather paints the ocean, Kayana Lamont takes the bodies of birds which feature in traditional genre paintings, placing them against neutral backgrounds as a study of beauty and mortality.
Amanda Hirst has plenty to say about communities and the loss of traditional industry. Her reworking of the infamous political poster “Labour’s Not Working” as “Not Labouring Isn’t Working” is eye-catching, and she is developing an interesting way of depicting urban landscapes using a combination of cut-out collage and paint. Barbara Boyne draws on her experiences of travel to create mixed media works in rich colours: some look like city grid maps, others more like songlines, landscapes abstracted from above.
There is as broad a spectrum of media in use here as I’ve seen at any art school this year: Taro Rosa has developed a distinctive way of carving into wood; Aidan Ellis makes sculptures out of glass; Fiona McGuire uses the textures of fabrics; Frankie Cardew and David Crockery both work with ceramics; Mel Colquhoun explores her subject, resilience and erosion through the Old Man of Hoy in a range of media.
Heather Thompson makes work about trees using dyes made from tree bark. Amy Sievewright draws on the natural world in a practice which includes photography, drypoint etching and linocut. And Ailsa Spence looks at the man-made world of skyscrapers and shopping malls in her photographs, countering the notion of surveillance capitalism.
Until 14 June
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