- Digital showcase, featuring work by over 500 graduating students, launched today, 9 June 2021
- Associated events programme runs until 20 June
Students at The Glasgow School of Art have demonstrated the importance of bringing creativity and innovation to the most pressing issues facing society in Graduate Showcase 2021 which was launched today, 9 June. Tackling issues ranging from the need for a more sustainable way of living, to gender, racism, health and well-being, and post-Covid redevelopment, over 500 students from the GSA’s five Schools – Architecture, Design, Fine Art, Innovation and Simulation & Visualisation – have unveiled work on the specially-created digital platform. As graduates they will also be able to add to their profiles on the showcase for 12-months offering the opportunity to present their developing professional practice.
The Showcase will be accompanied by a programme of events running from 9 – 20 June that have been devised by staff and students in partnership with Don’t Google It. Starting with the launch event hosted by comedian Jayde Adams and culminating in a commencement speech for students by Travis Alabanza, the programme features online events presented by each of the GSA’s five schools.
“Our students have created an exceptional body of work which is unveiled to a global audience today on our Graduate Showcase 2021” says Professor Penny Macbeth, Director of The Glasgow School of Art.
“The Showcase illustrates powerfully the imagination and inventiveness for which GSA students are renowned and enables people to see how different disciplines are approaching the shared concerns of today’s creative thinkers”
“As well as engaging with graduating students’ work on the showcase I also invite people to join us over the next 12 days for a wide range of discussions and events devised by our staff and students and featuring some very special guests.”
Interrogate the work by creative discipline or by of number of tagged themes and buy work by emerging artists and designers at:
Climate Emergency and Sustainability
Decrease our use of plastics – avoid fast fashion – reject the linear for the circular
IMAGES: Scobio – a biofilm plastic replacement grown from Scottish gin distillery waste; C-Filter a 2-tier filtration system which effectively collects microfibres; the 20 year mobile
Students across the GSA have addressed the climate emergency and the need to find a more sustainable way of living.
Product Design Engineering students unveiled a range of innovative products. In C-Filter Lauren Flanagan proposes a microfibre filtration system to target the marine environment. The world’s oceans are becoming increasingly polluted with micro fibres released from polyester and other non natural fibres. As society develops alternatives to plastics there is a need to address the existing pollution. C-Filter is a 2-tier filtration system which effectively collects microfibres on a macro scale. Powered by renewable energy sources, the system can be implemented in multiple locations and is fully submersible to target zones with higher densities of microfibres, maximising capture.
Meanwhile, Fergus Telfer offers a commercially viable alternative to the ubiquitous single-use plastic. Scobio, is a biofilm plastic replacement grown from Scottish gin distillery waste. Working with Electric
The built-in obsolescence of products such as white goods, computers and other electronic kit is addressed in Simon Linden’s 20-year smart phone. The average lifespan of a smartphone is only 2-3 years. With such high turnover of electronic devices, there are rising environmental and ethical concerns over their production and disposal. Simple repairs and upgrades could encourage us to use our phones for longer. If one component breaks or degrades, it can be easily replaced. If you want a better camera, you simply swap the old for the new. Treating the product as a service, the components are returned to the manufacturer to be recycled and reused within a closed-loop circular economy.
IMAGES – Poppy Brooks – design from Television, Snacks and Tiaras collection, Kialy Tihngang Useless Machines and Sophie Campbell OBJECT, PATTERN, COLOUR, SURFACE, TEXTURE
Fashion and Textile design students have addressed throw-away society and fast Fashion. For her collection, Television, Snacks and Tiaras Poppy Brooks chose to use natural, sustainable, dead stock and end of line fabrics. A pyjama suit (a representation of partying and comfort) , The French Fancy Dress (inspired by the hopeful parties and socialising dreamed of in lock down) and The Queen’s Jacket
For Textiles Design student, Sophie Campbell, responsible design was central to her collection OBJECT, PATTERN, COLOUR, SURFACE, TEXTURE. She sourced, and repurposed scrap materials into off loom woven objects and gathered other material – copper pipes, rope, ribbon, car alloys, furniture, cables and more to create a collection of contemporary weave.
As a comment on the increasing disposability of consumer electronics, which are often dumped in the global south at their end of life, Textile Design student, Kialy Tihngang, has created a collection of objects that mimic the aesthetics of e-waste and mock the movements of machinery. Useless Machines takes the unexpected combinations of colours, textures and shapes found within electronics as his inspiration reflecting how the garish and ugly innards of discarded laptops and phones contrast greatly with the sleek designs of their outer shells.
IMAGES: from Iona Turner’s The Seaweed Gatherer Collection and from Tara Drummie’s Sheep Shelter Camera, Bird Hide Camera, and Horse Box Camera
Silversmithing & Jewellery student, Iona Turner, has created The Seaweed Gatherer – jewellery materialised from gathered seaweed – applying a process that paid of careful attention to, and immersion in, seaweeds’ wild ecology. The pieces are made from Knotted Wrack seaweed (Ascophyllum nodosum), brass, recycled silver, hemp cord and bio resin
Communication Design student, Tara Drummie, who has been based in the Outer Hebrides during lockdown, has created a series of Camera Obscura using found objects. Harvesting Light is an ongoing body of work motivated by a symbiotic relationship between humans and the land, inspired by the crofters who encourage the rare and bio-diverse machair ecosystem prevalent on the Isle of North Uist to thrive. Sheep Shelter Camera, Bird Hide Camera, and Horse Box Camera reflect a collaboration between the more-than-human assemblages of the machair and the maker. The works are time-based and site-specific to North Uist, exclusively using matter found within a given environment to create a camera obscura, appropriately disposing of any harmful debris found on site upon a work’s completion.
Images: Rebecca Hodalova – Assembling Communities by Disassembly and Abby Hopes’ Design for a Music Centre
The 2021 Stage 5 City study thesis and Stage 3 project for Architecture students both asked them to address the issue of sustainable design.
Today’s construction industry mainly functions within the principles of the linear economy . A sustainable solution to this problem requires us to move from an extractive to a regenerative circular process. In Assembling Communities by Disassembly Rebecca Hodalova addresses one of the most complex design approaches to circularity – designing a building to come apart and be rebuilt elsewhere, or for all the components to be reused in another construction. A prefabricated kit of parts can be used where communities are not being catered for by any of the existing free cultural institutions, public libraries and community centres. Situated at the old Bellgrove Meat Market, sitting on top of a railway line she proposed the new Headquarters factory – a place of prefabrication, education, workshops, and community collaboration. The architecture of this factory reminisces the historical industrial sheds that used to dominate this area.
For her response to a brief to design a for a music centre and retreat for Sistema, Stage 3 student, Abby Hopes,drew on her own experience of orchestra residential trips as a young person. Her memory recalls a positive, organic experience, which grew from the gathering of people, the making of music. No matter the context or circumstances- the people made it special.
Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise programme transforms young people’s lives through musical education, whilst ‘making do’ within the constraints of their provided built environment. The creation of a residential retreat / performance hall in her proposal facilitates the culture of Sistema – driven by the variety of scales in which they gather. Ownership over space is central to the concept, allowing the young people to feel a sense of belonging within the public and private realm of Balloch. To ‘make do’ assumes to settle for lesser – but with the climate emergency we must use what we already have to our advantage.
IMAGES: Eilidh McEwan’s Water Cremation and Tallula Oellerich’s Tallywall
Interior Design student, Eilidh McEwan, offers a design of a Death Positive Space using water cremation. There are currently few sustainable options when it comes to the “death industry”. From the forests of trees used to make coffins to the million tons of concrete used for burial vaults and above all hundreds of thousands of gallons of Formaldehyde (one of the top ten most hazardous and damaging chemicals) used for embalming, it currently makes a major contribution to environmental damage. Elidh’s solution is to swap fire cremation for water cremation. Water cremation is an environmentally friendly alternative where the process of alkaline hydrolysis is harnessed to break a body down into its chemical components using water, lye, pressure and heat. The resulting liquid contains amino acids, sugars and salts and can be used as plant fertiliser. When compared to flame cremation, alkaline hydrolysis uses significantly less energy and leaves less than 25% of the carbon footprint of fire. Water emission drastically reduces the greenhouse gas emissions compared to fire cremation and the water used to reduce the body is less than 3 days-worth of water that the average person uses. By including eco death options into her Death Positive site she aims to encourage more sustainable practices in the funeral industry.
Fellow Interior Design student, Tallula Oellerich has focussed on sustainability with the design of a flexible wall system. The way we build currently is not sustainable. At the moment the building industry is responsible for 850 million tonnes of landfill waste every year in Europe alone. Most buildings are made primarily from concrete and sand for concrete is sourced mainly from the ocean causing the erosion of beaches to the point where so far worldwide over 25 islands have disappeared from the face of the earth, as a direct result of our irresponsible way of building. This has to stop. Her flexible wall design, Tallywall, acts as a simple solution to allow easy and resourceful renovation and repurposing of existing buildings. It tackles the ever-growing amount of building waste we produce by
Innovation School student Axelle Julien is a multidisciplinary designer with a focus on future-centred and environmental design. She first became aware of the value of water when living in the Congo.
Through her work she aims to stimulate an awareness of how natural resources are precious and we too often take them for granted especially in Occidental countries. In 2100 she explores what could happen in a sustainable community where we are communicating between generations to live in coalition with our biodiversity.
Health and Wellbeing
Cancer care 2030 – innovations to support the blind and people with Alzheimers
“We do think of what might happen in the future, but the way the GSA students work and are taught leads them much more towards preferable futures. That for us is very important as it gives us insight into how to get there. We very rarely think in such a systematic fashion and we certainly don’t normally create the atmosphere and the environment that allows those creative discussions to take place. For us it really breaks the mould and it gives us that time and space to do this. It’s a unique opportunity for us.”
Professor Nicol Keith, Director Institute of Cancer Sciences
Following a collaborative project looking at the future of precision medicine in cancer care in 2019, the GSA’s Innovation School formed a further dynamic community of practice with cancer practitioners and researchers from the Institute of Cancer Sciences at The University of Glasgow, oncologists and other medical practitioners to envisage a 2030 cancer care blueprint. The collaboration put the human experience at the heart of the work, and has enabled the cancer care specialists to think quite differently about the future.
In the scenarios envisaged by the groups, the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic is seen as a major influencer of how we envisage cancer care in the future. The UK decides to never let something of this severity happen again and to take more precautions in the future. By 2030 the UK becomes a health-focused society. In order to track health risks, the Ministry of Health has started calculating health risk factors for every citizen, via the H.R.F (Health Risk Factor). Information broadcasts regularly have alerts issued by the ministry of health so people with high HRF can take necessary precautions whenever they might be exposed to danger to their health.
Where possible treatment is delivered in the home environment and the patient is able to have more control over it. The future of care and treatment is built upon the foundations of a patient network, all stakeholders involved with the patient from diagnosis to beyond cancer will share responsibility for them. Citizen Supports emerge to enhance the humane, empathetic approach to sharing knowledge and supporting each other. Citizen Supports are the group of people who themselves have experienced cancer treatment or have closely witnessed the process. They will help the ongoing cancer patients in an empathetic way as well as giving them credible information to live a healthy lifestyle with cancer.
IMAGES Emma Williamson’s GuidePod®, Erin Hephzibah’s 49.5kg and Ahmad Zia’s Walk Eye
Personal experience has influenced many students in their practice. Growing up PDE student Emma Williamson was a big part of her Grandmother’s journey with dementia, from diagnosis to the later stages. She has used this personal experience and knowledge to develo– GuidePod® a product that
Meanwhile, Sculpture and Environmental Art student, Erin Hephzibah, has used her own experience as a carer to address the challenging and often misunderstood issue of chronic illness. Though the Covid-19 Pandemic has largely been a negative experience, it has created a global awareness of the isolation and restriction of being confined, and through Long Covid has thrown the spotlight on the nature of chronic illness.
In her work on the Graduate Showcase Erin focuses on personal experiences of illness and caring – inviting the audience to witness the psychological, emotional and physical battle endured by the chronically ill behind closed doors. The 49.5kg project is a collaboration with her sister, Georgia Francis, which shows the psychological battles of living with severe chronic illness. It aims to foster greater understanding within the general population and the medical profession about the impact of chronic illness. The emotional response felt when watching the film hopefully illustrates to the viewer the turbulent emotions the artist feel as her carer fostering
According to the World Health Organization, 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired of which approximately 39 million are legally classified as blind. Vision impairment has a significant negative effect on quality of life, which is directly linked to the lack of independent mobility. Ahmad Zia’s The Walk Eye aims to increase the mobility of visually impaired individuals.
A smart device designed with a low learning curve, it works with the user’s skills and forms a highly reliable obstacle avoidance/ guidance system. The system employs a set of Ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and notify the user about the direction, proximity, and motion of obstacles ahead of them. The user is alerted by sounds emitted through speakers placed near each ear or by vibrations on special bone conduction points.
IMAGES – Kirsty Gaunt’s Safe Consumption and Addiction Support Centre and Joanna Rosado’s home for the elderly
Interior Design student, Kirsty Gaunt has addressed a major issue facing Scotland in particular in her design for a Safe Consumption and Addiction Support Centre. She has designed an integrated centre which not only helps people who are currently using drugs, but also supports people who are in recovery. It provides space for individuals to gain advice and guidance on a range of issues including employment, housing and childcare as well as incorporating spaces to learn, relax and reflect helping to promote wellbeing. The concept also encourages people to build a community and support one another.
Fellow Interior Design student, Joanna Rosado, has designed a care home for elderly, which aims to destigmatize elderly care. Everyone at some point of life will need to deal with the number of challenges that ageing brings, but not everyone is lucky enough to be spending the last years of their life in a family home. We Live was created with the hope that this can change, that the trauma of moving to residential care can be avoided, or reduced. We Livebrings the message that whatever age we are at we deserve to feel respected and equally important members of society.
We Live feels like home, not like hospital. Bedrooms are suitable for couples as well as single people. Communal spaces offer a pleasant and vibrant atmosphere. Visitors of any age are always welcomed and are an integral part of residents’ everyday lives. Colourful, full of light and spacious spaces boost energy. A cafe enables “hanging out” with friends while having a cuppa and a snack and It becomes a dining room during mealtimes. There are smaller and quieter lounges too, which support relax and rest. Above all We Live brings the message- that whatever age we are at we deserve to feel respected and equally important members of society.
Race and Refugees
We have developed what amounts to a cultural blind spot about these chapters of our past, and our collective squeamishness that prevents us from openly discussing British slavery and the darker aspects of British imperialism has rendered us unable to properly appreciate the place of black people and Africa in our national story.
David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History
IMAGES – from Jack Batchelor’s Bobby Grotesque and Josie KO’s My Ladye with the Mekle Lippis’
In the week that the statue of Edward Colston again makes the headlines Communication Design Student, Jack Batchelor, takes the statue of Robert Peel in George Square as he starting point for Bobby Grotesque. Initially seeking to call for the removal of Robert Peel’s statue from George Square, Bobby Grotesque has developed into the idea to memorialise people whose stories orbit around the legacy of Robert ‘Orange’ Peel. Offering as his story that of Sheku Bayoh, whose family continue to fight for justice following his death in 2015 after up to six police officers knelt and lay across him, Batchelor extends an invitation to others to “use” Bobby for a socially-conscious purpose.
Bringing together a kitsch DIY aesthetic full of colour and humour with dark gothic undertones, Painting and Printmaking student, Josie KO’s, work playfully presents narratives which speak to the Black British experience in a white dominated environment. In My Ladye with the Mekle Lippis she responds to a poem by Scottish poet William Dunbar – Of Ane Blak-Moir’, which records the documentation of the presence of an African women in Scotland in the 16th-century. She reimages racist caricatures and stereotypes placed on the Black female body and turns ‘Mammy’-like figures into empowered, historically significant symbols.
Glasgow is celebrated as a city that has welcomed people from across the world from the Irish forced from their homes by the potato famine, Jews fleeing pogroms and the Nazi Europe and new generations of refugees and asylum seekers. Communication design student, Josh Croll has worked with Refuweegie, documenting the support that this charity has given the latest refugees to arrive in the city.
Meanwhile, In The Common Place, Terra Firma Stage 5 Architecture student, Timothy Khoo, proposes an architecture that challenges the status quo which includes misrepresentation of these communities and migration by the media. The language around migration in many western countries has been weaponised with terms such as the “Immigrant Crisis” and is used to instil fear of migrants entering the country – leaving the asylum seeker and refugee communities stigmatised and painted with the same brush. Currently, Glasgow is the only local authority area in Scotland which receives asylum seekers.
The Commonplace is conceived in contrast to dominant and imposing civic forms which the asylum seeker and refugee communities continue to face. It is a non-institutional building with the concept of an “open house” – a concept that aims to build a society founded on the values of fairness, equality and opportunity for everyone in Scotland, where everyone matters and all are included.
The building prescribes a dual function. Firstly, it will accommodate programmes which function to support and give agency to these communities. A resource centre, office spaces, casework support offices, childcare support spaces, language learning spaces, counselling spaces and emergency accommodation are some of the spaces which work to provide these communities with support and a sense of respite. These small services without red tape play vital roles in the integration of these communities with the local Glasgow population. Secondly, the building will accommodate open and free spaces for the wider community as well as refugees and asylum seekers to use.
Cultural Heritage
Students from across the globe mine their cultural heritage in Graduate Showcase 2021
IMAGES: (Top) Salvatore Capuano Leash (Yond); Mel Chuaiprasit From them, through me, to mine; Brigita Bivainyte Metamorphosis of Grain; (Bottom) Zhaoyan Wang From Home and Holly Murphy Vita Thenogi
The Glasgow School of Art is a place of cultural exchange and a melting pot of internationalism. Students have mined their own heritage and explored cultural history in their work for Graduate Showcase 2021
As an Italian living in Scotland Sulpture and Environmental Art student, Salvatore Capuano, is influenced primarily by his cultural heritage and displacement. He finds himself in a state of “suspended balance”, between two worlds in which he has had to adapt to change. It reflects on how he relates to his world and with his culture strongly affecting the work. Bridging the gap between his background and Scottish culture was hard at first to accept, but gradually his new environment opened many avenues and possibilities. The installation Leash (Yond) expresses his search for a true home in relation to feeling dislocated from his birthplace. It throws, metaphorically, an anchor over his hometown, Naples, to reach a different destination and destiny, being more open-minded, but still chained, tied to his cultural heritage.
Fellow SEA student, Mel Chuaiprasit explores how sensory and material experimentation, rooted in traditional artefacts and practices, can help to understand ideas about cultural heritage and belonging, particularly as someone of dual heritage. She uses traditional techniques as a framework for examining memory whilst playing with material to create physical displays of the mixed Thai and British culture that exist within. Her current project is embroidering for the first time, on a 6 metre long piece of hand-woven fabric, telling a story of her parents and her family.
In the Metamorphosis of Grain collection Silversmithing & Jewellery student Brigita Bivainyte creates designs inspired by the rich cultural history of her home country, Lithuania. In Lithuania shapes of wheat, rye, seeds, sun symbols, certain stones (amber), folk songs, woven textiles and costumes, all contribute to this cultural history and identity.. As with many folk arts, Lithuanian traditions are often considered obsolete, their meanings subsumed in modern forms of technology and mass production. This collection, made in brass, sterling silver gold-plated in 24k evokes these important and significant meanings representative of her national and cultural identities.
Communication Design Masters student, Zhaoyan Wang, presents a series of photographs about her 82-year old grandmother – a capable and optimistic old lady who has taken care of many children and has always kept the house in order. Born in Tongshan in the south of China in the 1930s she has lived through and borne witness to the many changes and events throughout recent Chinese history, including The Sino-Japanese War, The Civil War, the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution. Her story is not only her story, it is also a universal one that reflects the common fate of many ordinary people of her time. Whilst interviewing her Grandmother for the project, Zhaoyan Wang discovered that she had lived in 12 different homes/residences with each place representing a specific part of her history. Through this collection of photographs of her grandmother, her current home and of some sentimental objects that she has kept, Zhaovan Wang tells the story of an “ordinary woman, who has lived in extraordinary times”.
Painting and Printmaking student, Holly Murphy, has explored a lost part of Glasgow’s cultural heritage in Vita Thenogi. Saint Kentigern is the patron saint of Glasgow, yet, though he remains a popular cultural figure, his mother and one time co-patron of the city, Saint Thenog, has been largely forgotten. Saint Thenog has importance as both a folkloric and historical figure; as a woman, single mother, abuse survivor, and religious refugee; as a fading memory, a legend, and as a ghost haunting the roads between the firths of Forth and Clyde. Her story is a vehicle through which we can explore and untangle all the palimpsests of religion, folklore, gender, identity, landscape, language, politics, and history that have woven themselves into our lives over the last fifteen hundred years.
Explore more themes: including adaptation and reinvention, Covid and Tomorrow’s World, Gender and Representation; Neurodiversity and visibility.