The next generation of global creatives takes centre stage at The Glasgow School of Art Postgraduate Degree Show 2026, presenting innovation and emerging technologies alongside traditional craft, fine art skills, and socially responsive design. Running 28th August till 3rd September in Glasgow, with a preview and global digital showcase launching 27th August, the Postgraduate Degree Show is one of Scotland’s largest public exhibitions of emerging creative talent across art, design, architecture and innovation.
The Postgraduate Degree Show is a highlight of the academic year, offering a unique insight into our programmes and, most importantly, the depth and quality of work produced by our postgraduate students at our Glasgow and Highlands & Islands campuses. The show will be available for both in-person viewing in Glasgow and online via our digital showcase. Postgraduate students from across the School of Fine Art, School of Design, and Mackintosh School of Architecture will be exhibiting their final degree show presentations until 3rd September at the Stow, Reid, and Bourdon Buildings respectively.
The School of Innovation & Technology (SIT) exhibition takes place on campus from 28th – 30th August, and as part of this, SIT is hosting a day-long symposium. Taking place on Friday 28th August in the GSA Haldane Building on Hill Street, this year’s symposium “In Motion” offers a smaller, more intimate, and carefully curated programme of presentations from Master’s students across the School of Innovation and Technology and two expert keynote speakers. The symposium invites dialogue across urgent and imaginative questions concerning contemporary life, from health, care, and technological change to cultural participation, ecological futures, place, and more sustainable forms of living.
Professor Penny Macbeth, Director of The Glasgow School of Art, said: “The Glasgow School of Art’s postgraduate community is at the forefront of shaping the creative economies of Glasgow, Scotland, and beyond. This year, our graduates are bringing exceptional critical thinking and emerging technologies to address the urgent, imaginative questions of contemporary life.
“From precarious rural ecologies to socially responsive infrastructure and the intimate, lived realities of marginalised communities, the exhibition showcases how traditional craft and design innovation can powerfully coexist. Ultimately, these emerging artists, designers, and architects translate their deeply responsive visions into work that asks vital questions, delivers profound cultural impact, and drives economic growth—locally, nationally, and internationally.”
This year’s MLitt Fine Art Practice cohort demonstrates a diverse set of student perspectives and experiences, with continuing students from the undergraduate degree, domestic and international students, as well as students from non-traditional routes who have come through the GSA’s portfolio preparation course.
Maisie Wills most often writes with and about other people. Each work represents a different method of correspondence: between sender and receiver, artist and writer, one friend to another. These others embody friends and intimate relations as well as citations and references. In her work, ekphrastic and epistolary modes are used to locate the moments which evade capture, pulling into focus the incidental to navigate intersecting subjectivities. Will Farmer is an artist and writer from Sheffield, based in Glasgow. He works with fiction as a methodology to draw out and heed the latent unreality and ecstatic sensation present on our ecological planet in distress. The speculative realities and not-so-distant futures which live through this work reveal empathy and humour as sites of interconnectedness between character, reader, and author. Through narrative, audio, moving image, and installation, he presents eccentricity and absurdity as antidotes to the rigidity of the future we have been presented.
MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Kecen Zhou creates playful interactive installations that explore childhood memory, imagination, and everyday objects. Using toy cars, vending machines, mirrors, lights, and game mechanics, his installation Childhood Vending Machine transforms personal memories into participatory experiences. Inviting viewers to crouch, reach, and play, the work considers the fading imagination of childhood while reconnecting audiences with a sense of wonder and possibility.
Working across sculpture, metalwork, and experimental casting, MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Robin Currie explores the horrors of the corporate world and the loss of identity within the monotony of office life. Through dark humour and unsettling sculptural forms, his project examines alienation, repetition and the ways working life can consume a sense of self.
MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Dean Jones’ Veiled Encounters’ installation explores queer experience through intimacy, care, memory, and the erotic. Working across drawing, embossing, and found vintage textiles, and making use of vintage homoerotic pornography as an archive of inherited queer history, the project transforms images originally made for immediate consumption through slow, ritualised processes of making. By shifting these images from sexual spectacle towards tenderness, vulnerability, and contemplation, Dean’s work investigates the space between the pornographic and the erotic.
Working across sculpture and installation, MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Adrienne Murray explores vulnerability through femininity, desire, and the body. Her practice began with the image of a shattered rock growing daisies and spilling yolk, developing into a wider investigation of fragility and the unsettling ways vulnerability can sit alongside violence. Her exhibition Cacophony features a large sculptural work of wooden rings bound with rope, porcelain nails dipped in orange pigment, and pressed baby’s breath flowers.
Scottish, trans MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Owen Speir presents a compelling sound and sculptural installation exploring how transness interacts with time, waiting and material transformation. The work combines striking plaster and soap casts, handmade paper text drawings drawn from a found Hamlet tape, and looping cassette works using distorted analogue audio and an archival recording of him singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow as a teenager. Through repetition, decay, and disintegration, the work thoughtfully considers the prolonged waiting and suspended temporality experienced within transgender healthcare in the UK.
MLitt Contemporary Art Practice graduate Xiye Lyu’s immersive installation titled Everything Is Still Running is set in a post-virtual future where data, images, memories, and identities have become embedded in everyday life as a basic form of infrastructure. Xiye imagines a world in which data-storage towers suddenly begin to explode, scattering digital dust across the landscape, collapsing the boundary between the virtual and the physical. Within this chaotic ruin, memes drift through the streets, and a robotic vacuum continues working, believing itself to be “the last human”. Through this speculative environment, the project interrogates technological dependence, the breakdown of systems, and how meaning might be rebuilt when wholeness is no longer possible.
MArch Architectural Studies graduate Mufan Li’s interactive memorial cemetery design ‘Beyond the Monument’ addresses the profound societal oblivion surrounding unhoused individuals after their deaths, countering this “second death” through an everyday urban spatial mechanism that acknowledges mortality and preserves memory. Drawing inspiration from the biological structure and metabolism of the bell jellyfish, the project translates biological mechanisms into dynamic architectural spaces. The installation features balloon “gravestones” as temporary markers that breathe, grow and age. Ultimately, the act of commemoration becomes a series of continuous cycles of actions: staying, giving, receiving, and seeing anew, sustaining this living spatial machine.
Addressing Glasgow’s post-industrial legacy of environmentally degraded and socially disconnected brownfields, MArch Architectural Studies graduate Gabrielle Urquhart’s research-through-design project, ‘From Contamination to Connection,’ asks whether the processes of ecological repair can generate architectural and landscape design. Through a layered site strategy integrating ecological, infrastructural, and social systems evaluated via performance criteria, Gabrielle demonstrates how brownfield regeneration can foster resilient, inclusive, and ecologically performative public landscapes that enhance community well-being.
MDes Fashion and Textiles graduate Kangyuedi Chen’s surface-led womenswear collection ‘Edges Speak’, builds layered garments through structural segmentation, patchwork, and textured tufting, using a sheer mesh underlying framework to symbolise both support and confinement. Inspired by street graffiti as living residues lingering along seams and fabric edges, the deconstructed garments balance bold hues with tailored silhouettes. By incorporating up-cycled charity shop fabrics alongside hardwearing construction, the work materialises subtle personal imprints while embodying a commitment to slow-fashion sustainability.
Inspired by her grandmother’s forty years of farming in southern China, MDes Graphic Design Illustration graduate Xiaoyue Wang’s project, ‘Every Grain in the Bowl,’ explores personal heritage, rural roots, and the changing relationship between urban and rural peoples. Drawing upon vivid childhood memories of golden rice drying in the village square and wooden hand-powered rice hulling machines, Xiaoyue’s work carefully considers the labour and storytelling behind a difficult yet joyful rural life. As families migrate to large cities and connections to the land fade, the project employs images of rice, the body, and shared family memories to examine how this displacement alters our ties to family history and ancestral places.
MDes Graphic Design Illustration graduate Xinming He explores how notions of the sacred and the taboo are constructed through visual culture, directly responding to negative media stereotypes of pigs. Through historical research into religious iconography—specifically conventions like halos, symmetry, symbolic gestures, and decorative motifs—Xinming creates three publications and a screen-printed long-scroll illustration that constructs an alternative visual system centring on pig worship. By blending visual experimentation with religious texts, Xinming’s graphic design project critiques how visual culture reinforces prejudice, establishing hierarchies of purity and authority, and thoughtfully considers whether both sacredness and stigma are ultimately manufactured.
MDes Photography graduate Yunzhu Chen’s photographic practice humorously examines the relationship between the body, measurement, and standards. Yunzhu is interested in how standards are created, how they are applied to the body, and how they influence the way we understand and judge ourselves. Exploring and illustrating her critique through a series of surreal photographic self-portraits, Yunzhu wryly emphasises the arbitrary, confusing nature of these restrictive conventions.
Drawing from a lifelong connection to coastal communities and fishing cultures, MDes Interior Design graduate Hangyu Liu’s thesis proposes a repairable interior fish market system for the Guet Ndar fish market in Saint-Louis, Senegal. The design translates pirogue culture, reclaimed timber, and local fish production routes into a sensory space that supports everyday labour, public viewing, and cultural memory. Grounded in a design philosophy that views interiors as relationships between people, material, and memory, Hangyu employs material reuse to address changing shorelines, exploring how the physical environment can preserve and sustain the vital spatial and cultural practices of coastal workforces.
Danya Alkabani’s MDes Interior Design thesis “Belonging After Displacement” investigates how spatial environments can support the gradual rebuilding of agency and cultural memory following forced migration. Conceiving displacement as a disruption of identity, routine and social connection rather than just the loss of physical shelter, the project uses everyday rituals, food, and sensory memory as relational tools. The design manifests through a community kitchen, shared dining space, storytelling lounge, creative workshop and an evolving “Growing Memory Partition”. Rather than presenting fixed forms, these spaces act as collaborative frameworks that accumulate stories and recipes over time, repositioning interior design as a social and relational practice.
MDes Design Innovation & Circular Economy graduate Hainuo He’s project “Peatland Trace Archive: Landscape as Maker,” focuses on the invisible environmental degradation of Scotland’s Dava Moor, where drainage and climate change render drying peatlands vulnerable to destructive wildfires. Avoiding active containment systems, Hainuo developed a series of porous material modules and embedded them directly into the peatland. Over time, the organic interactions of water, soil, vegetation, and weather leave physical traces—such as cracking, staining, moss growth, and decay—directly upon the modules. This continuous, landscape-led transformation shifts the role of the designer, allowing the peatland itself to act as the primary maker of its own environmental archive.
Alexandra Tan, an MDes Design Innovation & Environmental Design graduate, addresses the post-pandemic degradation of third spaces and the rise of loneliness through the lenses of material anthropology and community care. Inspired by traditional crafting evenings in the Scottish Highlands, Alexandra developed a toolkit designed to help local organisers promote craft gatherings. Grounded in ethnographic methodologies and refined through co-created trial workshops in Forres, Scotland, Alexandra’s project emphasises local craftsmanship, regional materials, and tangible making. By making craft accessible, the project establishes a sustainable framework for community care, turning creative making into a vehicle for meaningful, intentional connection for individuals in isolated populations.
MDes Design Innovation & Environmental Design graduate Geng Liu’s ‘Gaelic Proverbs Panorama’ is an interactive, trilingual touch/swipe interactive website, designed as a museum prototype that explores the cultural loss occurring when a proverb is reduced to a single translation. Illustrating twenty-five Scottish Gaelic proverbs into a continuous, fictional Highland landscape across seven distinct environments, visitors can explore visual scenes, Gàidhlig wording, as well as English and Chinese equivalents. The project’s outcomes turn translation into an open, reversible journey, bridging languages without erasing their rich, place-based differences.
MDes Design Innovation & Environmental Design graduate Srushti Sachin Pagariya’s project, ‘The Bored Directors,’ is a physical instructional card system responding to phone restrictions in Scottish secondary schools, targeting the awkward, unguided gaps of unstructured time left for fourteen-to-sixteen-year-olds. Drawing on research with psychologists and educators, the project designs a voluntary entry point into self-directed imagination. The deck spans six departments—Observation, Misdirection, Communication, Making, Stillness, and De-Brief—inviting students to solve incomplete fictional briefs with no scores or correct answers. Functioning as a collaborative service model, the cards sit in shared school spaces, offering a low-pressure pathway to attention, curiosity, and conversation through minimal adult facilitation.
MSC Medical Visualisation & Anatomy graduate Andreea Nebunu’s thesis project focuses on the 3D computerised facial reconstruction of the Neolithic Clachaig Skull, which was excavated in the 1900s from the cairn of Clachaig Falls on the Isle of Arran. Inspired by a previous reconstruction from 1998, this research harnesses haptic technologies and specialised software, including Geomagic Freeform, Maxon ZBrush, and 3ds Max. By examining technological advancements in forensic and archaeological fields, the project sheds new light on how this early farmer, who lived on Arran over 6,000 years ago, might have looked. Ultimately, Andreea’s project offers this symbol of Scottish heritage immortality beyond the glass cabinet of the Hunterian Museum, where this new visualisation will be on permanent display.
MSC Serious Games and Virtual Reality graduate Zilin Zhang’s virtual reality project, ‘The Lunar Observer: A Study on VR-Based Meditation,’ offers an immersive sci-fi meditation experience designed to help young adults navigate everyday anxiety and find escape from the pressures of daily reality. Players assume the role of an external observer in a fictional science-fiction world where anxieties are represented through metaphor and exaggeration, allowing them to gather relevant data through simple, intuitive interactions. Upon completing these observations, players enter a custom-generated meditation space shaped by this user data, surrounded by low-stimulus environments and relaxing spatial ambience. By integrating anxiety observation with immersive environmental design, the project explores how virtual technology can support mental well-being and temporary relaxation.
MDes Sound For the Moving Image graduate Pete Lannon’s multidisciplinary practice, rooted in theatre and performance, playfully explores complex ideas starting from an autobiographical perspective. His graduation project, ‘My Number One Boy,’ is a prototype for a silly open-world adventure game reflecting his personal experience of parenthood and the responsibilities of caring for a chaotic, inquisitive young child. Interrogating how games let players inhabit masculinities other than patriarchal images of men as heroic conquerors, the work juxtaposes traditional mechanics of environmental mastery, control, and point-scoring with caring alternatives. Players are challenged to guide and nurture a Boy who, ignoring their to-do lists, prefers eating donuts and exploring.
Working across sound and visual arts, MDes Sound For the Moving Image graduate Maeve Callister-Wafer explores the deep-rooted connections between land, language, and memory, focusing particularly on her native Manx Gaelic. Her audiovisual composition, ‘Sweet Long Sighs’, uses historic field recordings of Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic speakers collected by the Irish Folklore Commission between 1935 and 1971. Drawing on the sound theories of Brandon LaBelle and François Bonnet, Maeve’s project investigates how spatial and technological voice mediation disrupts or enables memory. Utilising ambisonics to place listeners within an acoustic space, Maeve highlights non-semantic registers—sighs, laughter, clicks, and hisses—to connect with a body, place, and time we no longer have access to.
Artist, scholar, and educator dr. cevahir c. özdoğan presents their practice-based PhD in Fine Arts with a dissertation titled ‘Un/digging Space Tumulus—a handmade web: Multisensory Fieldnote on Queer Ecology and Archaeology.’ Their research project focuses on field notes that address the multispecies entanglement and ecosemiotics of tumuli as fluid landscapes, transcending binaries, and blending sensory, queer-ecological, Indigenous archaeology, and indigenous cyberfeminism to engage profoundly with place, time, and being. Rooted in multi-sensory field notes, their practice unfolds as an alchemical fusion of decolonising cyberspace through creative coding, permacomputing, ecopoetry, sound recordings, drawings, video, photography and eco-sculpture. c.c.’s multisensory field notes speculate on future ecofacts, inviting audiences into a poetic interplay of time, space and embodiment.
Students on the MLitt Curatorial Practice course present the outcomes of a number of exhibitions, performances, publication launches, screenings, and workshops. In ‘Other Worlds: Poetry and Thoughts in the Age of AI,’ Mengzhi Cao approaches poetic imagination and critical reflection through post-humanist perspectives on how artificial intelligence views the world, exploring the changing relationship between human and nonhuman subjects as artificial intelligence increasingly participates in everyday life. Cao collaborated with artists Xiye Lyu, Zijian Chen, Yixian Li, and eventually Jie Shuai, whose interactive AI poetry installation, Poetry River, ultimately completed the narrative. Combining experimental moving-image, AI art, and robotic installations, the curatorial exhibition aimed to engage viewers in seeking “poetic dwelling” and reconsidering how we might coexist through re-establishing relationships with ourselves, technology, and the world.
Lili Xue’s ‘The Uncanny: What Remains’ explores absence, liminality, transformation, and emotion as affective material. Grounded in authorial curating, the project started from subjective encounters with role-play video games and films. Xue collaborated with artists Subin Gang and Rebecca Rae, inviting them to respond to a poem through the lens of their own individual practice. Working together, the three artists transformed language into three-dimensional space, utilising black gelatine, transparent silicone, spoken voice, sound, and installation. Using a deliberate process of subtraction and restraint—relying on silence, natural light, and subtle atmospheric shifts—the exhibition aimed to engage viewers in completing a further transformation, questioning what remains after an encounter ends, and an exhibition disappears.
The digital showcase for the 2026 Postgraduate Degree Show containing works from all graduating students and launches at 4pm on Thursday 27 August at gsapostgradshowcase.net
For further information and images, contact press@gsa.ac.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS
Postgraduate Degree Show 2026 times and venues:-
28 Aug – 3 Sept 2026.
School of Design: Reid Building, 164 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ.
School of Fine Art: Stow Building, 43 Shamrock St, Glasgow G4 9LD.
Mackintosh School of Architecture: Bourdon Building, Scott St, Glasgow G3 6RQ 29.
School of Innovation and Technology: Haldane Building, 30 Hill Street, Glasgow G3 6RN.
Opening Times: 28 – 30 Aug. Weekdays 10am—8pm. Weekends 10am—6pm.
About The Glasgow School of Art (GSA)
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world. Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3500 students and staff across architecture, design, fine art, innovation and technology in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1500 students annually.
