0 That was Degree Show Time... in Dundee

BRENDAN COLLINS puts finishing touches to his Degree Show work

THIS PREVIEW/REVIEW OF THE DJCAD Degree Show 2013 APPEARED IN THE HERALD ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON MAY 18TH

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
University of Dundee, 13 Perth Road, Dundee
01382 385330
www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/degreeshow/

If you have studied for a degree, you will vividly remember the build-up to the moment when you found out what grading you’d been given.

So when I walked into the splendid new entrance of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) a few days ago, and found myself pitched into a gaggle of Fine Art undergraduates receiving their marks, I felt for every one of them.

Later, in one of the college’s many studios pressed into service as temporary exhibition spaces, I met one of their number, Ross Weryk, tweaking his installation, Hospital. This powerful work uses sound, video and sculpture to make a visceral statement about the way in which hospital patients become helpless in the face of medical intervention and pain.

A slightly flushed looking Ross had just heard he’d been gained a first class degree. As we talked and I looked at his work, which even shows film of him having his own blood extracted (talk about a metaphor), I learned that his mother died last year from cancer.

This spurred him on him, he told me, to go deeper than ever into his work and follow up an existing interest in cosmetic surgery.

I can see why he was awarded a first. As the late George Wyllie once said, ‘When you’re genuine with your art, you strike a chord and everything is all right.’

Putting together a degree show is a double-edged sword, and this being a degree show, let me tell you there are at least two swords on display here. One of them, presented by brothers Fraser and Calum Brownlee is deep fried and sitting in a bath of oil, and the other, presented by Dorian Braun and Jack Paton, has a large sign beside declaring, ‘Danger do not touch’.

These artists-in-waiting have all reached the end of four years of working towards an honours degree, and putting on what for many of them, is their first major exhibition in a public space. 

Art careers are often made at degree shows. 

Traditionally, they are edgy affairs. Taboo subjects are tackled with youthful gusto (nope, still can’t get the sight of that green member jiggling about in Jacqueline Chua’s video out of my mind, try as I might...) and many have still to learn how to put the old adage of ‘less is more’ into practice.

Dundee’s DJCAD, currently celebrating its 125th anniversary, is traditionally the first degree show to take place each year out of Scotland’s five art schools.

This year, the degree show is called 290°, a nod to the fact Dundee’s largest annual exhibition of art and design will feature the work of 290 final-year students, while an additional exhibition of alumni artwork will be held for the duration of the show.

Students from DJCAD’s 11 undergraduate programmes are all represented here.

It’s tempting to root out themes in a degree show and if there is one, it appears to be about searching for a bridge between tradition and the making of solid things.

Digital technology is used to augment hand-crafted, drawn or painted work, although there is some fine ‘pure painting’ from Allan Davies and Brendan Collins. I also enjoyed the freshness of Jaynie Topping’s landscapes, prints and sculptures, which mix up geology, geography, issues of land ownership and a sense of poetry connected to the land.

Cathy O’Brien’s Minotaur work is a fusion of craft meets sculpture meets video work and shows exceptional attention to detail. 

Jonny Lyons takes a boy’s own view of weaponry by making and displaying quite beautifully crafted sculptural versions of weapons and then documenting their use through photography in a touchingly boyish way. A black and white picture of a graveyard needs no artist statement.

Calum Crotch from Time Based Art and Digital Film dances to his own drum beat in a carefully constructed tented festival venue. There is purpose here, and he has already been accepted onto Creative Scotland's Starter For Six programme to further develop his ideas into a working business.

In Art Philosophy Contemporary Practices, Dan Shay gained a first for his thoughtful examination of how we blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual. This is intelligent work which can also be taken at face value.

Next door to his ‘shed’, I found Morgan Cahn putting the finishing touches to her shiny ‘reflective space’. Sporting one of her famous-around-the-campus handprinted t-shirts bearing the legend, ‘there is life after degree show’, Cahn plays with many disciplines, including; performance, film, textiles, printmaking and text. She is the living embodiment of the fact that it is almost impossible to pin down any degree show.

All human life is here. And more. Just watch out for double-edged swords.

Steven Camley

Smithy Gallery 74 Glasgow Road, Blanefield
01360 770551

www.smithygallery.co.uk

Until June 9

One of Steve Camley's watercolours - love this!

In the daily hubbub of the rolling news machine which is the background to all our lives, it’s easy to take for granted the creative spark which goes into producing a cartoon every week day.

But day in, day out, come rain or shine, as news stories flare up, politicians come and go and public figures drift in and out of our collective consciousness, cartoonists across the world sit down at a blank page, and turn out little nuggets of genius. 

I am sure there are many people reading this now who turn to Steve Camley’s cartoon on the comment pages of The Herald every Monday to Friday before they look at anything else.

Since 2003, Camley has been this newspaper’s resident cartoonist. He has been named Cartoonist of the Year in the Scottish Press Awards six times in that period. Prior to this, with sister paper, The Sunday Herald, and Scotland on Sunday, he picked up three further awards.

It’s not often cartoonists make the leap from newsprint to gallery wall, but thanks to an intervention from his friend, author and artist, Alasdair Gray, 65 original watercolours by Camley will be adorning the walls of The Smithy Gallery in Blanefield for the next three weeks. 

According to gallery owner, Natalie Harrison, Gray – who exhibited with the gallery last year – suggested to her that she consider an exhibition of his friend’s work.

“Alasdair is a big fan of Steven's work,” she explains. “He went through hundreds of paintings with me to choose the final 65. 

“I’ve never held an exhibition of this kind. We see these cartoons every day in print, and I am delighted to be dedicating an exhibition to celebrate the talent behind them. The original watercolour paintings are full of high-quality draughtsmanship, wit and energy. They are also quite beautiful.”

Gray adds: “Newspaper cartoons are sold cheaply in such large quantities that hardly anyone thinks the original pictures from which they are scanned have value untill after the cartoonist dies. 

“This exhibition is a chance to acquire an original work to enjoy before posterity catches up with you.’

Detail: That was Degree Show Time... in Dundee

0 Lynda Morris, Audrey Grant & Hardie Affairs

Dear Lynda…

Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design

University of Dundee, 13 Perth Road, Dundee, DD1 4HT

www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk

01382 385 330

Until April 5

Where to start with Lynda Morris, the artists’ curator, who for the last 45 years has worked tirelessly at the coal face of contemporary art? This new exhibition at Dundee’s Cooper Gallery is drawn from Morris’ vast personal archive and features artworks, artefacts, catalogues, posters, correspondences and ephemera and all relate to key stages of her career.

The black and white preview card shows an impossibly cool-looking young woman in Biba mini-dress and black boots sporting a Mia Farrow-style crop.

This is Morris in 1967 in one of the studios at Canterbury College of Art where the students’ life model was one Robert Wyatt and where fellow students included Ian Drury. 

At Canterbury, Morris was taught by Terry Atkinson a key player in one of the most influential conceptual art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Art - Language. Other tutors included acclaimed figurative painter Stephen McKenna (also her boyfriend at the time) and Michael Craig-Martin, now credited with fostering the careers of the Young British Artists.

From her days spent working at the heart of the London art scene in the 1970s, when life was one big psychedelic whirl, usually involving her good chums, Gilbert & George, to her most recent major work of curation, ‘Picasso, Peace and Freedom’ at Tate Liverpool in 2010, Morris was always biting at ankles in the art world.

She blames this tendency on her ‘Red Clydeside’ roots. Her father was a cabinet maker from Greenock and the family left for the south of England when work became scarce after the second world war. Morris was just two years old.

Today, Morris is more mother hen than hippy chick. True to form, she has a self-deprecating story to hand for anyone expecting to meet a sleekly-sculpted older version of her younger self.
“I went to an opening of a Gilbert & George exhibition in 1999 in Milton Keynes and they made a fuss of me,” she says. “I apologised for being an old lady now. George took my arm and whispered, ‘We are all old ladies now.’

Morris is refreshingly free from airs and graces and talks about herself as ‘fan’ of artists rather than a high-powered curator who can pick up the phone and talk to everyone who is anyone in the contemporary art world.

Today, officially past retiral age, she lives in Norwich, where she teaches at Norwich University College of the Art. She was curator of the Norwich Gallery from 1980 until 2009. This influential gallery had very close links with Scottish artists from the outset.

One of her early exhibitions featured ‘Seven Poets: An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Alexander Moffat’. Today, she talks warmly of her friendship with Sandy Moffat and fondly remembers the poet Sorley MacLean coming down on the train. 

In 1991, acting on a desire to break free from the boundaries of a London-centred art scene, Morris established EASTinternational, an open submission exhibition in Norwich. EAST became rapidly responsible for launching the careers of many artists, including Jeremy Deller, Matthew Higgs, Hurvin Anderson, Lucy McKenzie, Karla Black and Corin Sworn, and turned Norwich into a recognised international hub for contemporary art.

East established Morris as the Artists’ Curator and this exhibition talks this idea out in spades.

“We decided to do this big project every year and it ran for 19 years,” she says. “The only rules were that there were no rules. There were three strands to it; an international strand, a London-based strand and a regional strand.

“We didn’t want to have people just out of art college. There were no rules about age and I was very keen that we encourage women who had maybe had a career break due to having children to work with us.

“Artists come to live in Norwich for a spell and make the work there, which was quite unusual at the time. It had a real community feel. We’d drink together and go to the beach together on a warm night. Curators used to tell me they’d have to get to East every year to see who they’d take in.”

Dear Lynda... is an exhibition for anyone interested in what has made the international contemporary art world tick over the last four decades. 

From the catalogue for the first exhibition installation she worked on at London’s ICA in 1969, to an angry ‘Dear Lynda’ letter from leading art critic, Peter Fuller, to a half pint glass engraved with ‘For our dear Lynda with love from Gilbert & George 9 July 1973 XX’, there’s a feast of Morris memorabilia here.

I particularly liked a cheque for £12 from major art collector Charles Saatchi, sent to Morris in 2003 when he was looking for a catalogue for East.

Morris explains: “The Clydesider in me thought, ‘why should I send him a free copy?’ So I asked him to send me a cheque for £12 first. He sent the cheque and I put £12 in cash into the till and kept the cheque as a memento!

The exhibition also features an audio interview with Morris by Cooper Gallery curator Sophia Hao, accompanied by an autobiographical ‘zine. 

Opening with a picture of the scrap of paper containing the Rolling Stones’ autographs dating back to 1962, it perfectly illustrates Morris’ ongoing adventure in the art world which, as she put it, “has never been a job, just the perfect way of life”. 

Audrey Grant: New Paintings

Union Gallery

45 Broughton Street

Edinburgh EH1 3JU

0131-556 7707

www.uniongallery.co.uk

Until April 1

Last month, I was asked along to Audrey Grant’s studio to meet the artist and look at the paintings she was preparing for her first solo exhibition at Edinburgh’s Union Gallery as a preparation for writing a short foreword for the catalogue.

I’d seen Grant’s work two years ago in The Union Gallery when she last showed in a two-person exhibition. Gallery owner Alison Auldjo had remembered I had been very struck by Grant’s paintings and asked if I’d write about my reaction to the new paintings.

I can’t remember now what I wrote in the visitor’s book that day but I do remember the paintings. Slightly forlorn figures set against a plain, yet painterly background. Grant’s figures were so sensitively rendered that I remember feeling a shock of connection to them. There was texture in the surface; splashes and dashes of colour. The figures were swaddled yet scraped back. It was almost as though you could tell they had a history.

This new collection of paintings, which she has worked on for 18 months, continues Grant’s exploration of the human figure and the painted surface. Somehow, the new figures don’t seem so awkward. The painterliness is still there but they seem to sit better in their selves.

In the twist of a back, or a hand reaching for a heart, Grant is able to render complex emotion on a flat surface. These are intense paintings and her public is loving them. According to Auldjo, 16 of the 25 paintings Grant produced for this exhibition have been sold already. Of that number, 14 were sold at the opening last week.

Go see these paintings before they fly off to the four winds. They connect and they are quite special.

Skin Over Bone
Pathfoot Building
University of Stirling, FK9 4LA
www.artcol.stir.ac.uk/
Until May 3 

A new exhibition at the University of Stirling celebrates the work of former Glasgow School of Art (GSA) teacher James Hardie and his two daughters, New York based artist Gwen and Borders-based film-maker Amy.
The exhibition title comes is taken from Neal Ascherson’s book Stone Voices which examines Scottish identity through history and landscape.
The bone under the skin of Scotland’s landscape is explored by the work of James Hardie, now in his 70s and living in Skelmorlie, Ayrshire. Hardie has worked in film and paint since graduating from GSA in 1959. His work includes portraits of family members and his love of flying, showing Scotland from the air.
Hardie and his late wife Ann settled in Fetternear in rural Aberdeenshire. “They lived in a former school house where outbuildings became a painting, sculpture and pottery arts space, doubling as a playground and games hall,” explains Cameron. “The girls remember rushing their tea to follow their parents into the studio to work and create art.”
Gwen Hardie, born in 1962 and a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, became the youngest living artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
“Gwen Hardie takes a more literal look at ‘skin over bone’ – focusing on the landscape of the female body,” said Cameron. “There’s fragility about her work which takes us beyond the surface of the female form.”
Amy Hardie, 54, was recently film-maker in residence at Strathcarron Hospice, near Denny. Four excerpts from her acclaimed documentary, The Edge of Dreaming, are also being screened as part of the exhibition.
The film charts how Amy dreamt about the death of her horse, only to find her horse dead. She then dreamt that she would die aged 48. She filmed the year leading up to her 48th birthday, and the worries she had about her own mortality. 

Detail: Lynda Morris, Audrey Grant & Hardie Affairs