Be Not Afraid... @GraysArtSchool

Degree Show 2015, Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Garthdee Road
Aberdeen AB10 7QD, 01224 263600, www.rgu.ac.uk/degreeshow15
On until 27th June (10am – 5pm throughout the weekend and from 10 - 8pm on weekdays) 

This review appeared in The Herald newspapers's Arts supplement on 20th June, 2015. The image used in the paper was a painting by Emily Hill.

AS Chris O'Neil, the new head of Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, says in his introduction to this year's degree show, ‘Art schools are strange and complicated places. 
This much is true. The same could be said of degree shows. These annual exhibitions of graduating art students’ work can be complex to navigate and occasionally baffling in content. 
This year in Aberdeen, the Fine Art department at Gray’s has 59 exhibitors; 21 in BA (Hons) Painting and 38 in BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practice (CAP).
The latter course is making its degree show debut for 2015 and sees a coming-together of Gray’s previous printmaking, sculpture and photography courses. All these subject specialisms still exist with CAP but, according to department head, Allan Watson, there is greater cross-fertilisation among graduating students.
It certainly makes for a richly-varied experience as you walk through Gray's northern light-filled studios and corridors. 
There is an almost unprecedented (these days) commitment to painting at Gray’s – and it shows in the quality of the work on show. The fact that the 21 graduates have been saturated in the art-form for the last four years is writ large on the walls.
There were several outstanding students. I found Hannah Murray's vintage sampler-inspired heavily textured paintings incredibly moving. Densely layered with suggestions of familiar imagery, such as bells (for hearts – foretelling a wedding) and thimbles for spinsterhood, you feel like reaching out and stroking them. Feeling the layers as well as sensing them. Beautiful work. 
Nearby, Heather Macinnes explores process and pattern, piecing her intricately vivid  designs together with almost religious fervour.
There’s a theatrical sense of time, space and physicality in Craig Lee's tactile paintings. His circular sunlike crimson painting, with its arc of juicy paint following the swoop of the circle, draws the viewer right into its brooding dark heart. Symmetrical and almost zen-like in compostion, it takes a lot of effort to make something look this fresh. 
Dutch-born Didi Jellema, explores the notion of being adrift between two countries in her large paintings which combine seemingly disparate elements of embroidery, geology, mapping and text, to great effect.
Vivid colour is a recurring theme in this degree show, as is harking back to the comfort of childhood. Northern Ireland born Emily Hill has used childhood memories to cross-examine the cultural legacy of a divided country in her large scale paintings. There’s a naivety to these works which doesn't seem forced. Her rhubarb-in-the bath painting raised a smile, as did the one with makeshift badminton net (two buckets with poles sticking out and a fishing rope slung between them).
Neda Ghaffar's paintings, examining the rituals of Islamic daily prayers are crackers. There's one featuring row-upon-row of hats which is suffused with colour and pattern. It’s a joy to behold.
Sally Duguid has taken the seemingly mundane starting point of broken blocked drains or cracked pavements and found beauty in the pattern and colour while Amy Dobbie's vivid narrative paintings are politically-charged and reference contemporary political issues. Her black-eyed tiara-wearing Queen with dinosaur body is an image which lingers long after you leave the room. Her piéce de la resistance is a snarling 3d head on a stick made from old scrapings of paint. I think it’s the first time I've seen paint used like that in a degree show and it’s a show-stopper.
Influenced by Mondrian, Laura Porteus has produced several outstanding and luminous paintings which conspire to be clean in terms of colour, line and shape, yet simultaneously crumbling and peeling, as though dissolving into thin air.
Jenni Murison already had a couple of red dots on her intricate postcard-sized block paintings, which talk out the intricacies of domestic life and the ever-present precipices therein. A personal favourite was one with three teacups sitting atop what looks like a diving board; a green whistle on string emerging from the top tea cup. 
The good news for anyone who, like me, had a notion that they'd like to go to art college (but who were told, like me, by their parents they'd never get a decent job afterwards) is that Gray’s Painting course has the oldest graduate in the School this year in 72-year-old George Robertson. 
George has clearly used his four years well and his assemblage paintings, which consists of materials such as wood, gold foil, cloth, old newspapers and comics, photographs and even a pair of scissors, have an ordered yet strangely dissonant clarity.
In the Contemporary Art Practice course, several students work stood out for me; including GianPiero Franchi, whose idea of asking visitors to press a button which fires a football noisily towards a waiting trampoline at ceiling height will make the unprepared leap in surprise. 
Jessica-Lucky Airlie has created a series of exceptionally moving narratives on an ancient typewriter. Using stories of women talking about formative experiences, she has translated them onto scraps of satin. It works on several levels. The stories immediately draw you in while conspiring to look softly pretty yet substantial.
Fraser Brodie wasn’t in situ when I was there, but from the description in the catalogue his performance sounds intriguing. I took a peek through his black curtains and walked into a luminous yellow room, in which he assures asserts visitors will ‘interact with a living entity inside.’ It sounds like we should be afraid. 
Please don’t be afraid of this degree show though. It’s a living entity and full of surprises which will stay in your visual memory for a long, long time.