Category: Illustration

Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show 2019

It’s Local Degree Show time again! I spent a good Saturday afternoon looking around, with the one bad point being that the Illustration kids were too hungover to open their shop table. Anyways, my favourite dozen, in no particular order, were:

Cecile Bec combined illustration and sculpture, such that her whole show formed one giant composition.

Joanna Migut used a tightly restricted colour palette to great effect.

Eleanor Begg used enormously energetic lines in her paintings, with vibrant colour splashes

Catherine Paterson was my favourite in sculpture – an interactive show encouraging people to make rubbings of her brass and laser-carved wood wildlife images. It looked like it had been enormously popular on opening night as well.

Courtney Szabo had one of my favourite shows – intense, spontaneous movement, massive energy and great colour contrasts all over the place.

Hannah Benassi was another stand-out show, with subdued tones layering into some remarkable compositions.

Sam Renson left me utterly confounded and entranced – giant painted seascapes that look like distorted aerial photographs on crumpled paper.

Kirstie Behrens had some beautifully crafted near-abstract landscape prints on show.

Maia Aitken had some wonderfully expressively alien compositions, with careful colour work.

Lucia Pearla was another highlight, with highly detailed abstracts giving the impression of cityscapes, dominated by almost-legible letter forms shouting into the illuminated dark.

Maike Herrmann was one of several shows in Textile Design that caught my eye. Amazing multi-layered prints, with great depth and complexity.

Katie Scott, likewise, had enormous vitality and playfulness in her work, with a great interactive board for kids to add to her designs.

Molly Marshaley completes the set of vibrant, joyous textiles, with geometric shapes abraded and worn into textures.

Aimee Coulshed finishes my list, with sublime landscapes created in fabric.

That’s fourteen, but don’t make me choose.

Deep Sea

I’ve always been fascinated by the deep sea, and I’ve nearly always lived in sight of the sea. I love to stand at the shore, my feet at the edge of the water, and think about how from there it’s a straight line all the way to Greenland or Norway or Canada, or a curved line to any damn place. And on the way to that place, what do you pass? Every creature in the sunlit ocean, every thing that swims and crawls and floats and chases and runs and sits and waits, going about their business almost entirely out of sight of people. And you go deeper, out of sight of the sun, and it’s not even a mile away but the rules change entirely, pressure and dark creating entirely alien environments that still fill the usual needs of completely unusual things.

And then there’s the door.