TRYING to spot new talent is always fun and the degree shows are a good opportunity when each year a couple of hundred artists are launched on the world from the Scottish art schools. There was always a second shot at this too in the student exhibiti
on held annually by the Royal Scottish Academy. The old format for this show was a work each for every graduating student who wanted to partake, but this year, in keeping with a broader revision of its remit and its engagement, the Academy has come up with a new format and has renamed the show New Contemporaries.
Working in cooperation with the schools, a team from the RSA led by Will Maclean has selected a group of the best graduates from each institution. The numbers are in proportion to the size of the graduating year. Edinburgh and Glasgow have the largest contingents, followed by Dundee, Aberdeen and finally a single student from Moray College. It's Scotland's newest art school, and its first intake has now graduated, so it is included here for the first time. There are also six architecture graduates, one each from the architecture departments of Edinburgh and Strathclyde Universities in addition to those from the art schools that teach architecture. In total there are around 60 graduates taking part. It is a number that already makes the whole thing much more manageable than it used to be. Each student not only has more space than formerly, but they have also been given the opportunity to make new work, so this is not simply the degree shows revisited. It is a whole lot of little one-person shows.
The solitary representative of Moray College is Georgina Porteous who has an ambitious installation in the central gallery. It summarises the cycle of life with a gigantic inflatable unborn baby tethered by its umbilical cord floating above a very surgical-looking commode and a sinister lifting harness for the elderly and incapable.
Beyond this is a full-sized replica of the cabin and part of the jib of a construction crane by Euan Taylor. It's certainly ambitious, as six men were struggling to put it up when I was there. The other end of the gallery is dominated by a huge portrait by Fraser Gray, adorned with an archery target and an arrow that has missed the gold.
On the side wall, Charlie Billingham has played an ingenious visual game with Seurat, hugely enlarging the dots of a colour-printed reproduction so that close-to the pictures are quite abstract, but from a distance they slip back to being Seurat. Elsewhere Ric Warren has created an assembly of sinister watchtowers on spindly legs beneath the legend on the wall "Society of Captives". Mary Ramsden has an assemblage of 78 separate canvases. Beautiful individually as well as together, the panels are all worked in a cool palette. Occasional fragments of writing suggest that what unites it all is the fluent continuity of the artist's hand.
In the lower galleries, Ashley Nieuwenhuizen has made a teacup with a white mouse curled up inside it. It looks like a double homage to Lewis Carroll and Man Ray and, in keeping with that inspiration, in a remarkable film she demonstrates that she herself also has a truly surreal imagination. In one episode in the film, she gargles a mouthful of water with a goldfish swimming in it. Waterboarding with fish added, you become genuinely anxious for her, though both she and the fish look quite relaxed.
There is nothing quite so arresting in the annual Visual Arts Scotland show at Edinburgh City Art Centre. The Scottish Society of Women Artists reborn with a broader remit, the VAS now offers a wider range of art forms than the other exhibiting societies and so includes tapestry, furniture, ceramics, jewellery and various other crafts as well as painting, printmaking and sculpture. Bumped out of its usual slot in the RSA by the National Galleries of Scotland's forthcoming Turner exhibition, the Society is camping in cramped conditions with 300 exhibits packed into two floors of the City Art Centre.
There are several striking pieces of sculpture in the show. Tom Allan's All Along the Watch Tower is a minimal composition of three pillars of white marble, each drilled and partially polished. Alistair Jelks's Corrosion is also really impressive. A life-size seated figure with his head in his hands, it appears to be made of cast iron (the catalogue is unhelpful on this) and is flecked with rust. The title seems neatly to reflect both the rusty iron and the figure's mental state.
Wear and tear, at once physical and mental, seem also to be a feature of Mhairi Killin's poem, I am melancholy, engraved in English and Gaelic on a piece of steel, worn, pitted, patched and then polished. Angela Hunter's bronze hens are also charming, and as a whole the sculpture seems more interesting than the more numerous works in two dimensions. Less in quantity, it clearly benefits from having more space. On the walls there is a pair of big spooky photographs by Richard Davis of sinister, shadowy dolls. Joyce Gun Cairns's Wallpaper seems to be a melancholy comment on the human condition in general and on the feminine share of it in particular.
Much of the furniture in VAS looks plain uncomfortable; skill deployed to pervert function. For that reason, Claire Barclay, showing across the road in the Fruitmarket, would not look out of place in this company. Her work displays, in the same way, exquisite craft that teeters on the edge of perfect pointlessness – or indeed in her case, frequently tumbles over it into the artistic void. Her sculpture is made up of beautifully crafted elements in a variety of materials. She particularly favours leather and stainless steel. The result is frequently like some deconstructed ghost of a Mies van der Rohe chair, or perhaps, even worse, when she uses actual hides, a nightmare in Land of Leather, but she carefully avoids any meaningful relationship between the diverse elements she deploys; the bits suggest that something has been disassembled, but it could never be reassembled into anything useful.
Caught in Corners, a work created for the Fruitmarket, is composed of hay bales coated in lime plaster and draped with stitched cotton fabric, together with brass rods, woven wheat, slatted wooden boxes, mirrored glass and leather, all in a random arrangement. According to Habit is likewise a new work. It is composed of a river of flat black vinyl mats spreading out across the floor from a frame constructed of steel and wood. Laid on the mats are two entirely nonfunctional weightlifters' dumb-bells in stainless steel.
It is all terribly precious and the beautiful crafting of the individual elements only makes it even more so. She says she likes to suggest references but not complete them so that the spectator's imagination will work in the vacant space. But who will bother to explore the vacant space?
It is all just a bit presumptuous; presumption that is encouraged, I fear, by the hype that surrounds an artist in our credulous age once their reputation is established. You are supposed to gaze in wonder at the mysterious working of the artist's imagination in the way she conceives and places things. I am afraid I didn't. The vacant spaces remained stubbornly vacant. The finish is seductive, but in the end it doesn't obscure the whimsical emptiness.
This is a sort of retrospective, and in earlier works there is the hint of an edge, of some kind of hook that might snag your imagination and get it engaged, some grit for your mental oyster, but confronted with the smooth emptiness of most of this work, my imagination rapidly goes elsewhere. It has better things to do than try to find some kind of logic in an arbitrary set of choices that have no discernible chain of thought to connect them.
&149 New Contemporaries, 14-25 February; Visual Arts Scotland 2009, until 19 March; Claire Barclay – Openwide until 12 April
