Invited Graduate Artists 2011

The Society of Scottish Artists 2011
114th Annual Open Exhibition

Each year, as part of its commitment to contemporary art, the SSA is proud to showcase the work of recent graduates from the five Scottish Art schools; Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Moray. Members of the SSA Council are despatched to each of the shows to select and formally invite two graduating students to exhibit at the following years Annual Show. Not only is this an excellent opportunity for these artists to show their work alongside newly emerging and established artists in a prominent public venue, but it also gives our members and visitors to the exhibition a glimpse of the kind of work being created in our educational institutions.

This highly respected Annual Exhibition has been held for well over a century and takes place in the heart of Edinburgh in one of the country’s most prestigious art venues, The Royal Scottish Academy. Several thousand visitors pass through the doors of this world-famous location during the Annual Exhibition’s month-long run.

The students are further supported by an SSA Council Member who acts as mentor and supports them with their arrangements. In addition, their work is featured prominently in the exhibition catalogue and here on the SSA website. In this way the Society actively engages with the very best of the country’s emerging artistic talent and invests in their future.

Mary Somerville
Dundee and Jordanstone College of Art

Creatures on an ongoing journey interact with familiar objects under
theatrical lighting, creating a silent and atmospheric visual poetry
using stop motion animation techniques.

In my work, mythical creatures interact with each other and their surroundings, confronting obstacles and working out their place in their world as they embark on a continuous journey with no beginning, middle or end. Expressing moments of solitude, empathy and indecision, ‘Dog’ ventures on – constantly moving, observing and exploring, yet seemingly reaching no final destination.

I construct sculptural and architectural film sets of various minimal and desolate landscapes, which provide the location for these stop-motion animations to take place. Shot under dramatic theatrical lighting, I aim to bring this newly created world to life, creating an atmosphere that is vaguely familiar whilst perhaps mildly unsettling.

‘Continuous Journey One (Sirius the Dog Star and Dog)
Animation within Installation

Lyndsay Gauld
Grays School of Art

The object ‘Frankentrond’ was gradually constructed through a layering system of filtration sheets used during the malt whisky making process to remove alcohol esters from the whisky before bottling. My work negotiates between organic material, matter and form, and the built object both in two dimensional and three dimensional contexts.

Title: Frankentrond

Daniela Justiniano
Edinburgh College of Art

In my work, I make a connection between weaving and architecture. I think of architectural space as a textile, a fabric. Thus, in the overlapping of each other, they create space, as we perceive it.

To result from reading and decoding of space understood as text and weaving, as a way of bonding and connecting one point to another, it is possible to think of our presence in it as another weaving.We could think of the space as a network of relationships that creates meaningful connec- tions between humans and their environment, and thus giving us ways to question it.

Title: Wandering

Anna Geerdes
Grays School of Art

The surface is the landscape,
a landscape in fragments,
a place with the illusion of timelessness.

What hovers above and
what hides beneath
the surface?

The land is shifting underneath our feet.
Stitched up, named, numbered and overseen.

Is there any place that is neither mapped nor named?

Is there any place that is like the gap between heaven and earth?

Is there any place for the non-place, Utopia, where all things are possible?

 
Libby Amphlet
Moray College of Art

My work explores place, time and change. I look at how we alter our environment, and the effect that this has on the population, landscape and infrastructure. I use found objects, photography, video, text and sculpture to create work which examines and reflects on how we deal with the changes we make to the world around us.

The Hydro
Concrete, glass, found objects, gelatin silver print, video projection
SIZE
concrete and glass unit (floor based): 92cm x 42cm x 38cm
silver gelatin print : 62cm x 46cm
video projection: approx. 40cm x 40cm
EQUIPMENT USED
DVD player and projector

Katy Thomson
Edinburgh College of Art

James Kail
Moray College of Art

These paintings are from a larger body of watercolours that provide an intimate portrayal of the hangouts, rendezvous and territories used by some of Elgin’s young people. They are distilled images, representing a few young lives and their presence in society.

Framed size: all 35 x 27 x 3cm.

Pia Mannikkö
Glasgow School of Art

The starting point for my work is the body and space, whether intimate or architectural. Movement and volume of the human body is my source of reference and research. I am interested in spaces we occupy and the personal space of an individual, as well as ideas of micro- and macrocosms.
Mapping time and attempting to make its patterns visible is also an important concept within my work. Making as a process, creating objects that gradually grow and change is central to my practise. I hope that the playfulness that the working process can give me is accessible also in the end result.

Title : Some people knit
Size: 210 cm x 160 cm x 140 cm
Medium: Masking tape, wood, concrete and metal

Paul MacDonald
Glasgow School of Art

I have always considered myself an able person, but cognitive of my difference. I was born without hands; but this isn’t the full extent of my birth defects. Perhaps the greatest barrier to life is my prosthetic leg, a manufactured limb enabling mobility and independence.

The dependency on the limb has evolved my identity as a person and established limitations to my abilities. My hope is to inspire survival in an indiscriminate world.

Twinsockets

Victoria Haycock
Dundee and Jordanstone College of Art

My work is concerned with place and memory, drawing inspiration from forgotten spaces in the landscape to evoke a sense of nostalgia and mystery. Motifs are often layered and repeated to encapsulate the saturation of time within living and geological memory, and to build a sense of an existence that belongs simultaneously to history and fantasy.