The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2026 Opens, Launching a New Generation of Graduate Talent to Boost Glasgow’s Creative Economy and Arts Community, Underlining the Institution’s Key Position as a Culture-making Powerhouse.

The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Degree Show 2026 opens to the public on Friday 29 May till 7 June, where a new generation of students showcases their innovation, creativity, and energy in what is Glasgow’s largest public exhibition of work. Staged across the entire Garnethill campus—spanning the Reid, Bourdon, Haldane, and Stow buildings—this year’s showcase represents a critical moment for a new generation of creative talent emerging into their professional lives. 

The physical show will run alongside an expansive digital showcase, which launches live on 29 May.  

Over 600 students from across the GSA’s four schools—fine art, design, architecture, and innovation and technology—will exhibit work that addresses the contemporary landscape they will face as they start their creative careers—from community and collaboration, heritage and personal history, social inclusion, materiality and process, perception, folklore & mythology, ecology, sustainability, and the environment. The show not only celebrates the achievements of the graduates but also emphasises the importance of creativity and innovation in addressing current societal challenges. From product design, engineering, and interaction design to painting and printmaking, silversmithing and jewellery to photography, the range of projects on display highlights the students’ ability to tackle complex issues and push boundaries across disciplines.

GSA graduates contribute significantly to the wider civic and cultural life, from Silversmithing & Jewellery Graduate Militsa Milenkova’s ground-breaking 2026 Commonwealth Medals design, to Flora Macfarlane’s recent Fashion show presentation at the Burrell Collection, to GSA graduates’ participation across Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art’s 2026 programme. The roles our graduates play across the city’s creative economy speak clearly to the continuing value of interdependent communities and creative exchange. 

Professor Penny Macbeth, Director and Principal of The Glasgow School of Art, said:

“Degree Show is the most important moment in the GSA’s yearly calendar, transforming our campus into an expansive gallery that welcomes the city into our creative community. It is a vital platform for our students to transition from academia into professional practice, offering a unique insight into the rigorous, critical, and inspiring work that defines our graduates’ global reputation. 

 The relationship between the GSA and Glasgow itself is symbiotic. As the largest economy in Scotland, the city thrives on its creative industries, and the GSA remains a primary participant in this engine for growth, with nearly 60% of our graduates choosing to remain in Glasgow. They crucially support and sustain the city’s cultural infrastructure.”

Community, Heritage, and Social Resilience

The photographic landscape collection Glowposts by Communication Design student Callum Cole employs long-exposure light painting to highlight the goalposts of grassroots football pitches across Northern England and Scotland. By illuminating these frames after dark, Cole transforms mundane sporting grounds into surreal, melancholic symbols of local heritage and community identity. Callum’s images serve as a poignant political critique of the increasing disappearance of grassroots playing fields due to systemic funding neglect and commercial development. Through his striking photographs, Callum celebrates the foundational role of amateur football clubs, while warning about their increasingly fragile future, powerfully illustrating the tense contemporary duality between the commercial importance of sport and the harsh, precarious reality of urban community spaces.

Product design student Alisdair Haig’s project Cairn aims to foster community connection to woodland restoration through the monitoring and removal of the invasive Rhododendron ponticum plant. This multipart system consists of specialised soil monitoring equipment and an output hub. By utilising evocative soundscapes to notify local communities of various outputs, Haig allows the care of the land to be placed directly within the hands of community members rather than local authorities.

Inspired by the book ‘Religion for Atheists’, Anca Iliescu, Mackintosh School of Architecture (MSA Stage 5), examines religion’s positive impacts on society, during periods of grief or collective celebration. Her thesis project, Temple Without a God, reinterprets these as secular architectural rituals within a historic block in central Copenhagen. The project responds to the loss of religious feeling by proposing a support system that scaffolds major moments of life through an Axis of Life, Grief, and Celebration. Through repurposed brick, concrete, and choreographed light, she creates a phenomenological, multi-sensory environment that fosters connection, introspection, and mutual care rather than traditional worship.  

Communication Design student Natalie Yong’s work explores letterforms as a vehicle for carrying culture, emotion, and voice. Her signage project Adult Shop was made in response to her Fine Art Critical Studies extended essay, The Aesthetics of Geylang. The sign’s visual language is rooted in the Peranakan architecture and tilework of Singapore’s most infamous red-light district. By applying the culturally revered aesthetic to an adult shop, Natalie brings legitimacy to sex work, embedding it within the visual language of heritage.

Interior Design student Daria Baginska’s Citizens Art Quarter reimagines forgotten infrastructure into a creative hub of making, learning, and performance, transforming twelve arches in the Gorbals into interconnected studios for artists, makers, and visitors. An internal passage links the spaces, creating moments of discovery and community. Beyond the arches, an outdoor area activates the public realm, hosting the Glasgow Farmers Festival in summer and serving as an open theatre in collaboration with Citizens Theatre.  Daria’s design concept blurs the lines between artist and visitor, aiming to enhance Glasgow’s status as a global creative destination.

MSA Stage 4  student Ailsa Hutton’s The People’s Framework addresses the disconnection of the digital age, where city centres are full of people glued to screens and ignoring strangers. The design creates a space for local people to find connection again, bridging generational gaps to motivate policy change and active community improvement. By incorporating the idea of “play” and child-like curiosity, the project breaks people out of their comfort zones to invite everyone into the conversation. It challenges occupants to come up with genuine solutions for their built environment, turning architecture into a creative, communal tool for social resilience.

Climate, Ecology, and Sustainability

Inspired by a fascination with biology and biomimicry, Iris Lam, MSA Stage 3, highlights the hidden natural wonders of the Glenfinnan area, focusing on the loss of temperate rainforest and bio-fluorescent fauna. Her project employs a timber rod structure coated in mycelium to facilitate growth. This mycelium eventually decomposes into the ground, providing nutrients and neutralising soil acidity to create favourable growing conditions for forest regeneration. The observatory allows people to use UV light to see species fluorescence.

MSA Stage 5 student Rachel Houston’s Fælles Vand (meaning ‘common water’ in Danish) establishes counter-infrastructures for local flood resilience as a direct response to climate-change-related sea rise in Copenhagen. Drawing on the concept of “Seed-Planning”, the proposal creates a network of civic water harvesting nodes that change character in different urban circumstances. These community-driven nodes decentralise the power of top-down planning, empowering locals to autonomously process and redistribute storm-water as a civic asset. A highlighted Floodline connects each site, poetically echoed by a water wall that acts as an interactive pathway, reframing the management of the impending crisis into a fundamental resource for gathering.

Chloé Grimes-Biltis’s work explores the tension between desire and danger via hyperreal depictions of venomous jellyfish, particularly the Portuguese man o’ war. Drawn to their seductive yet lethal beauty, Chloé’s works transform documentary imagery into surreal, almost tactile encounters. Saturated colour, translucency, and surface effects make the paintings seem almost touchable, inviting both fascination and unease. Through material experimentation and shifts in scale, the paintings blur boundaries between natural and artificial, familiar and alien, luring viewers into confronting their own impulses to hide toxicity beneath beauty.

Fashion design student Youyitai Zhang is a fashion designer exploring time, decay, and transformation through garment construction and textile experimentation. Her work uses wrapped volumes, exposed layers, button systems, wire-shaped hems, and alum crystallisation to question whether ageing can become a source of beauty, memory, and emotional durability.  

Textile Design student Maia McLaren’s Harajuku collection is deeply informed by research undertaken during an exchange visit in Japan. Maia’s works investigate bold, decorative designs that balance structured compositions with organic botanical forms.  Her four collections investigate distinct organic botanical motifs and colour narratives found in gardens and natural environments, exploring a particular relationship between floral forms and Japanese pop art.

Technological Simulation and Medical Innovation

Product Design Engineering student Erin Duffy’s Sonarc is a portable, low-cost ultrasound device designed to improve access to medical imaging in resource-limited settings. Through a simplified and repairable system, the project balances usability and durability while addressing a critical global need. This project demonstrates a strong focus on functionality and real-world application, showcasing a rigorous, process-driven methodology. As an emerging designer, Duffy challenges conventional boundaries to propose thoughtful responses to contemporary life, engaging with the world through a sharp sensitivity to materials and a spirit of experimentation aimed at solving pressing global issues.

Jessica Payne, a Sound for the Moving Image student, demonstrates the relationship between sound and emotion, specifically gender expression surrounding screaming, through abstract audio-visual works. She detaches the emotions of screaming from the human body using the visual method of clay stop motion. Additionally, Payne presents an eternal loop stop motion film as an allegory for menstrual depression, following a character whose progress on a raft is constantly reset by waves. Her work explores the relationship between conceptual and technical sound skills, creating work that ‘does good’ and tackles societal problems while reflecting an underlying tone of hope.

Finley Highton’s work is made at the intersection of technology and image-making using a unique architectural drawing machine, employing what he calls “non-choice”.  Using this automated process, Finley minimises his own authorship in the works created, purposefully interrogating the dynamics between human intent and machine control. The resulting work is site-responsive to its exhibition environment, ultimately challenging viewers to reflect on the processes and conditions the art itself requires to exist.

Gender, Identity and Representation

Silversmithing & Jewellery student Josie Chanfi’s Métisse collection is inspired by a British-French-Comorian heritage, exploring the amalgamation of cultures through the lens of Bristolian graffiti and Comorian textiles. Colour becomes a central theme, using spray paint on aluminium casting to create intricate, lightweight, and bold wearable pieces. These works act as symbols of identity and memory, intimately tied to the body of the wearer. By researching design traditions in museums and archives, the collection blends vivid shades and patterns to explore a side of identity that has long fascinated the artist, transforming heritage into a series of bold, practical adornments.

Product Design student Maya Lo’s project, How do you spell Scotland, deeply investigates the diverse and nuanced experiences of Scottish identity, specifically focusing on the perspectives of young female Scots. The work takes the form of a community-focused exhibition that invites visitors to explore what belonging and identity mean through reflection and language. By facilitating tangible examples of community understanding and seasonally rotating curatorial work, Lo aims to instil hope and tackle problems facing modern society.

Fine Art Photography student Jacob Flint Oliver uses installation, photography, and sound to interrogate the human obsession with arbitrary systems of classification, showing how non-binary gender identity destabilises these systems. For Oliver, non-binariness means sidestepping gender’s solidity to become undefined. Responding to societal denials of this existence, Jacob highlights how ridiculous commonly accepted ideas on gender can be. Beginning with private bodily performances, data is extracted and abstracted into absurd, uninterpretable terms. Through processed layers, the body is obscured; its presence is instead disconcertingly implied through proportions, curvature, and the fluid materiality of gut-like silicone, poured wax, and unsolid sound.

Kirsten Wood draws on lesbian history and queer club culture, using fluid silhouettes and unexpected colour palettes in traditional suiting fabrics to challenge norms and celebrate inclusivity. Their work highlights the potential for fashion to communicate identity while responding to broader cultural and ecological concerns.

Silversmith & Jewellery student Melissa Stewart’s Through the Album seeks to evoke the tactile nostalgia and emotional connection of family photography by engaging with visual storytelling to bridge past, present, and future. The collection documents lives raised in industrial Glasgow, drawing inspiration from the fluidity and structure of dance and movement. Photographs are transferred onto metal through an unpredictable process that yields imperfect, candid moments as raw as the memories they hold. Each box signifies a new chapter and a vessel for stories, creating a journey through a never-ending archive that continues to evolve as new family memories are uncovered.

Interior Design graduate Carrie Matossian’s project, The Fold, is a women-centred making and cultural space set within a former entertainment venue on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. Once a place where women were put on display, Carrie reimagines the building to question how and why we see. The public galleries celebrate women’s craft as a material language, while private workshops create space for making, addressing long-standing gender imbalances. At its core, a 12-metre vertical void—‘The Fold’—shapes moments of visibility and concealment. Soft, familiar ideas of femininity meet raw industrial materials and sharp forms, creating a space of contrast that challenges how women are represented, experienced, and celebrated.

Perception, Materiality, and the Mundane

Communication Design student Belle Breslin embraces aspects of the mundane, blending analogue and digital processes across film, design, and object-making. Their surreal imagery and distinctive use of colour draw attention to inner worlds and overlooked details, transforming the mundane into something curious and unexpected. This approach encourages viewers to reconsider everyday objects and find beauty in the unfamiliar.

Painting & Printmaking student Maj Olsson Gendt engages with painting as a scientific and material process, investigating how substances react and transform autonomously. Layers of muted acrylic wash dissolve rabbit glue primer to produce intricate patterns. Olson’s works depict interiors devoid of human inhabitants, echoing her ceding of human control to her materials.

Sculpture and Environmental Art student Robyn McCrae has manufactured a conveyor belt of eight cow heads, programmed via an Arduino-controlled motor to move back and forth, kissing the cow seated opposite. Attached by a red seatbelt stitched into its mouth, the project, titled Coward, is a tongue-in-cheek political reflection on conformity in society. It highlights the behaviour of silence and inaction through a kinetic Mexican wave, making a statement that life continues and nothing changes in the same cycle. This installation visually performs a “kick up the arse,” inviting viewers to reflect on diverse intentions and forms. 

Sculpture & Environmental Art student Dylan Hope brings a comic grotesque into everyday experience, using theatrical, bawdy, and vaudevillian installations to reimagine the gallery as a kind of object-based theatre.  In his ‘I’m working on a building (tenement)’, an assemblage of disparate elements creates a sense of gothic dissonance, where doll-like figures seem to emerge at the edge of vision. The work unsettles the act of looking, as familiar objects shift between inert props and suggestive presences. Drawing on shared domestic sensations—sounds, smells, and neighbouring lives—Dylan exposes the instability of private space, where boundaries blur and protection becomes difficult to distinguish from confinement.

Silversmithing & Jewellery student Samantha Ross’s Flow maps the relationship between digital form and physical making, capturing a state of total absorption where making feels effortless and instinctive. The collection transitions from 3D-printed nylon to aluminium casting, where each material captures a different version of how flow is felt—whether fluid and liquid or tangled and restless. Constructed through instinct rather than intention, the work reveals the tension between rigid geometric structures and organic forms. It asks what it means to be in control of the making process, presenting four years of momentum, confusion, and clarity as objects to be worn on the body. 

Rita Rogers uses photography to engage with landscapes and infrastructures, focusing on sites marked by extraction, surveillance, industrial and military intervention. Rita considers how these environments make visible the hidden forms of contemporary violence and the systems embedded within them. By positioning the photograph as both witness and inquiry, I want to investigate and understand the relationship to these concealed worlds we live in.

Degree Show 2026 will be open from Friday 29 May till 7 June, across the GSA Glasgow Campus in Garnethill. The digital showcase will be available on 29 May from 5pm at gsashowcase.net

For further information, please contact press@gsa.ac.uk

NOTES FOR EDITORS

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