Images: Sustainable textiles by Beth Furini, Garnethill Bread Oven by Eleanora Jaroszynska
and Vivienne Kelly's Wing River,(section)
Recycled wire and wool made into beautiful interiors products, recycled stone from the Mack used to make a community bread oven in Garnethill, recycled Glasgow pigeons turned into a sculptural installation – it could only be The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, the annual showcase of work by the cohort of graduating students from the acclaimed creative institution. This year sees the work once again spread over four venues: Architecture in the Bourdon Building, Design disciplines over 5 floors of the Reid Building, School of Fine Art over two floors of the Tontine Building and MFA in the Glue Factory. Degree Show opens to the public on Saturday 10 June running until Saturday 17 June.
“The Glasgow School of Art is celebrated for innovation and creativity, and Degree Show is one of the most tangible manifestations of this,” says Professor Tom Inns, Director of The Glasgow School of Art. “For our students it is a chance to present their practice to potential buyers and employers. For visitors it is an opportunity to get a first view of some of the ground-breaking design innovations that will shape our world in years to come, to see and buy work by talented designer-makers and artists, and to simply revel in the fruits of our students’ creativity.”
“Degree Show also marks an important point in the development of our students’ practice as they complete their studies. Many will stay here in Glasgow where they will join a creative community of GSA alumni that has helped to put Glasgow on the map as a centre for the creative industries. Others will move away, but will take with them the skills and the experience developed at the GSA that will help grow the creative economy not just in the UK but internationally.”
School of Design
- Beautiful interiors products created out of recycled wire, foam and wool (Textiles Design)
- Changing attitudes to dyslexia and a micro-nation which has declared independence from the UK (Communication Design)
- An open-source portable kitchen, crockery with designs reflecting levels of food waste and an on-going live project between the GSA and the Royal Bank of Scotland (Product Design)
![]()
- Innovations ranging from aids for people suffering dementia, to improvements to virtual reality gaming and encouraging us to eat more insects (Product Design Engineering)
- Collections on show in the Reid Building and Promenades in the Blythswood Square Hotel (Fashion Design)
·
Images: Outfits by this year’s cohort of Fashion Design students and
Cubic Salt and Pepper Dishes with Spoon by Lesley McAlpine
Textile Design student, Beth Furini has turned cast off industrial and recycled materials into beautiful interiors products for her Degree Show collection. She presents a collection of stylish interiors products – modular seating, cushions, acoustic wall panels and other accessories – showcasing her commitment to sustainability. Having contacted companies across Scotland to source discarded products she was offered foam by Glasgow-based Paulamarand wire from Aberdeen-based cable and connector specialists, Hydro Group. After exhaustive experimentation she developed a successful working method of integrating the foam and wire into a cohesive ‘fabric’. Cutting the foam into strips and punching a series of holes along its length, she was able to crochet and macramé these components together with recycled wool. The outcome is a collection influenced by traditional ‘Mochillas’ (bags) and friendship bracelets using crochet and macramé techniques which she had come across whilst travelling in Columbia.
Beth’s work will be on show on the ground floor of the Reid Building alongside designs by the graduating cohort of Silversmithing and Jewellery Students and collections by the Fashion Design students who will also show their designs in a Promenade event in Blythswood Square hotel on Monday 12 June.
Image: one from a series of books created by Lucy Grainge to help broaden our view of dyslexia and
Communication Design students will show work on the first and second floors of the Reid Building. Lucy Graingewas identified as dyslexic in her first year at art school. Since becoming aware of this she has been intrigued by the connection between creativity and dyslexia. She was aware of the challenges she faced, but not necessarily the benefits to her creative practice. On the whole, society’s knowledge of dyslexia is limited to problems with reading and spelling, but dyslexia is much more multi-faceted than this. While dyslexia can create difficulties at school and day-to-day life, it can also manifest as strengths and skills which are often overlooked. Lucy has made a collection of books which aim to broaden our view of dyslexia, seeing at it as a different way of brain processing rather than as a disability. She wants the books to inform, encourage and inspire those with dyslexia, their families and their teachers. “We shouldn’t try and make children ‘less dyslexic’ but instead ‘better at being dyslexic’. Dyslexics see the world in a different way. We should celebrate it!”
Images: Amir Saidani’s “article 50” letter and Border Control sign
Also among the projects on show is Scottish student Amir Saidani’s micro-nation. We live in an increasingly divided world, especially considering the global events that have taken place over the past few years. Brexit, the Scottish Independence Referendum & Donald Trump’s election have all made us reconsider our place in the world. Taking a satirical look at the most extreme potential outcome of current political moves – a world made up of a series of micro states - Amir has declared independence from the UK and created an exclaved micro nation located at his desk space at the GSA. Amir has also written a letter to Theresa May outlining his nation’s independence in a language intentionally borrowed from her Article 50 letter to the President of the European Commission, Donald Tusk
Image: Luis de Sousa’s Kitchen-O
Luis de Sousa has designed anopen-source portable kitchen that brings cooking rituals back in to refugee centres, where people don’t have the facilities to prepare their own food. It offers refugees the possibility to manifest and share their cultural background through their traditional food. Perhaps even more importantly, Kitchen-O allows families to provide for themselves and their loved ones. Being an open-source product, the instructions are available for anyone to reproduce it, and it is entirely digitally fabricated, thus being locally built, with locally sourced materials.
Images: crockery illustrating amounts of food waste, part of Zuzana Peskova’s SUM
Zuzana Peskova has used design to help to reducefood waste in student halls - creating sustainable behaviour through design. Her project focused on students as they move into halls – a time when they begin to become independent and responsible for their own decisions. It is the point at which the young people create new habits, so hopefully sustainable behaviours learned at this point will remain with them for life. Among the tools that Zuzana used to communicate key messages was SUM – a food starter kit to be shared by flat-mates. The kit includes a set of crockery with designs showing levels of food waste. SUM connects people and food: the whole is greater than the SUM of its parts.
Images: imagined characters embodying key issues and sentiments
that might influence customer behaviour and needs in 2030.
Also displayed at Degree Show are the outcomes of the on-going collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Following a successful partnership in 2016 co-designing approaches to banking for Generation Y, the two organisations have got together again to explore of the future of banking and financial services looking ahead to 2030. Among the outcomes of the collaboration, which included a range of discussions workshops and focus groups, was the development a number of imagined characters embodying key issues and sentiments that might influence customer behaviour and needs in 2030. The project is an example of the innovative and collaborative approach fostered at the GSA, and demonstrates the value that creativity can bring to the wider economy. For the students the opportunity gave great insight and real experience of the world of professional design practice, which they are about to enter into. For the Royal Bank of Scotland it was an opportunity to test their design methods and experiment with GSA’s user-centred design techniques.
Among the projects presented in Degree Show 2017 by Product Design Engineering students are innovations that support people suffering from Dementia and chronic anxiety, re-designs for the household including improved flat pack furniture, a tea-making innovation, enhancements to improve the immersive fun of VR, an umbrella that can survive even the Glasgow weather and a project looking at how to feed ourselves more sustainably by farming and cooking insects!
This is the latest cohort of students following the programme that has produced leading international designers including Jonathan Biddle - Industrial Design Senior Manager, Amazon; Amy Corbett, Senor Designer - Lego; Kate Farrell - Group Leader Functional Design, Cambridge Consultants; Etienne Iliffe-Moon - Director of Industrial Design (San Francisco) for BMW; Scott McGuire - RDD Manager, Dyson; Sam Smith - Design Lead, Apple; Gavin Spence - Senior Product Manager Tom Tom and 2012 International Dyson Award winner, Dan Watson, whose award-winning SafetyNet was developed as a final year PDE project at the GSA. PDE graduates have also set up award-winning companies in their own right including 4CDesign, CorePD, Fearsomengine, Meso Design, Red Button Design, Safehinge, Speck Design and wylie3D. A number of these companies were founded on the success of projects that were developed whilst still undergraduates.
Image: Caroline Mackie - Hydra+ Hydration Monitoring System to help people
with Dementia drink enough fluids
Dehydration is a massive problem for almost everyone, but especially for those with Dementia living on their own. As we age our thirst declines meaning knowing when to drink before dehydration occurs is increasingly difficult. After speaking to carers, occupational therapists, GPs, Biomedical engineers and people with Dementia it was clear that the problem stems from users not knowing how hydrated they are throughout the day. Currently carers have no idea of how much someone has eaten and drunk when they are away and thus find it difficult to know when to take action before dehydration strikes. Caroline Mackie’sHydra+ aims to allow users to monitor their total body water levels using a safe and trusted technique and notifies them when they are at risk from dehydration before it occurs. Carers and loved ones can monitor the user through an app and can intervene if the user’s hydration does not improve or stay at a healthy range.
Gergana Tatarova - Future of Food using insects for food to make
how we feed ourselves more sustainable
The world's population is continuously increasing. The way we feed ourselves today is simply not sustainable. We need to produce more using less. Gergana Tatarova’s project is about Entomophagy - using insects for food. She spent the last few months farming crickets and exploring their lifecycle and habitat preferences. Her product is a vending machine for roasted seasoned crickets. What sets it apart from a usual one is that everything happens inside it - breeding, cooking and dispensing. It produces a kilogram of food a day with just a square meter footprint
Image: Andreas Eliassen - Better Haptics in Virtual Reality, a system to improve the immersive fun of VR.
Virtual reality has recently started to be available to consumers, however the lack of vibrational haptic feedback available in these systems often pull users out of their VR experience. Andreas Eliassen has developed a controller feedback system that will allow people to distinguish between different sensations, magnitudes and directions, enabling more immersive and fun VR experiences. Further information on all the innovations being showcased by Product Design Engineering students visit:
Zoe Gruber - Hospital ward corridor
Design for a more engaging and uplifting space for patients, staff and visitors.
Also on the 4th floor Interior Design students will showcase two projects each: a personal and a choice project. The choice project is a response to one of a series of set briefs within fixed locations ranging from hospitality to retail design. For the personal project each student is showing a response to a self-initiated brief based on their own particular interests and relating to a chosen site from within the city of Glasgow.
Mackintosh School of Architecture
![]() |
| Design from P1 Architecture / Education project |
The Stage 3 Architecture programme in 2016-7 predominantly focussed on the theme ‘Institution’ with the studio programme consisting of two design projects which addressed the contextual relationship, programmatic and environmental challenges of the institution as a place of studying, making, socialising, and exhibiting.
The brief of the first design project ‘P1 Architecture / Education’ was influenced by a collaborative project between six schools of architecture:
- Bauhaus-Universität Weimar [MA] (Host institution)
- Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II [MA]
- Technische Universität Wien [MA]
- The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts [MA]
- University College Dublin [MA]
- Mackintosh School of Architecture [Stage 3]
Under the theme ‘The University and the City’ the brief was asked for proposals to extend the GSA campus with a new school of architecture on a site on the northern slope of Garnethill. 22 of stage 3 also used the brief to develop proposals for the expansion of the Bauhaus campus in Weimar/Germany.
The brief of the second project ‘P2 Portable’ asked students to generate proposals for a portable building containing a gathering and exhibition space. The pavillon was required to create a physical presence and awareness of the Glasgow School of Art as an institution and brand in several major cities across the globe. In groups of two, the students proposed their visions after an initial period of two weeks before individually embarking on the INTERACT project to develop those visions in greater detail.
INTERACT is MSA’s long-standing student collaboration with the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University, and the University of the West of Scotland. Teams made up of students of architecture, civil engineering and quantity surveying are developing the structural and economic aspects of each proposal. The final event was the presentation of all projects to an interdisciplinary panel of architects, engineers and quantity surveyors.
Images: Jerome Wren Palais des Machines, India Czulowski The Eurasian Control facility
Ren P'ng The Inverted Street,
Stage 5 Architecture at the GSA aims to encourage confident, individual, disciplined, critical and imaginative work that is researched in depth, argued with clarity and supported with artefacts of the highest standard. The task of Stage 5 is to undertake a self-selected programme of study, out of which grow a series of questions, which are answered through a rigorous design exploration founded on philosophical, economic, social, historical, cultural, technological, material, political, programmatic, strategic, contextual, environmental, construction, structural and architectural research. This year the students have been challenged to investigate urbanism in the context of the European City with a focus on Madrid. Three studio teams explored different themes:
Fields of Interaction
A city operates across many different fields, across various scales, and with many frameworks. How these fields influence each other and how are they influenced by elements which are interior and exterior to them, was the starting point of the investigations
An Urban Archipeligo
Madrid is characterized as a series of islands that are not connected in a deliberate way and they exhibit a variety of urban conceptions from different time periods. The team explored the interface between these different ‘‘islands’’
Metropolitan figures.
Madrid has two extremes of urban density – horizontal medieval fabric and vertical tower – this team explored the idea of new Metropolitan Figures, encompassing civic space, imposed structures and public rooms.
School of Fine Art
Graduating students in the School of Fine Art are once again showing their work in the Tontine Building for Degree Show. Spread over two floors this year sees the three disciplines of Fine Art Photography, Painting and Printmaking and Sculpture Environmental Art presented in discrete groups. Work by 34 Sculpture and Environmental Art students is installed on the 3rd floor with work by 26 Fine Art Photography students located on the 4th floor. 73 Painting and Printmaking students, the largest cohort to date, are split between the 3rd and 4th floors.
Eleanora Jaroszynska(Sculpture and Environmental Art) is showing an installation as part of Degree Show as a precursor to work beginning on the creation of a community bread oven in Garnethill Park. The oven will be constructed out of stone and wood from the Mackintosh Building which cannot be used in the restoration. Following a number of pop-up events with a temporary bread oven at which the community was surveyed on the idea with positive feedback she applied for permission to locate a bread oven permanently on the site. Once constructed the oven will be available for the whole of the Garnethill Community to bring their bread dough to be baked. Through this creative use of communal space the public becomes both user and owner. Work on construction will begin later this month and will be completed in July.
The inspiration for the project is a desire to develop a sense of community. Bread forms the base of our historical and contemporary diet throughout the world, having been present in our diet for at least the last six thousand years, however, the art of baking bread is becoming forgotten in our hurried modern lives. Hopefully the communal bread oven will both inspire a return to making our own bread and engender a sense of community as existed when a communal bread oven was the norm.
South Korean Artist, LEA (Painting and Printmaking) has used her experience of growing up surrounded by a perpetual fear of nuclear war, and the cynical capitalist elements of war. Her project – a performance work, :has been in development for several months, but has come together at just the right time to parody the current situation between Donald Trump and North-East Asia. She portrays the role of a naive bomb character with humour, whilst trying to emphasize the absurd propaganda game we are faced with. The audio playing during the performance is a recording of each country justifying their first nuclear weapon test. Lea wants the audience to wonder about who is evil and what is justice? Coming Soon! alsoencourages audience participation. The audience can see and experience that nuclear war isn't just a Sci-Fi story or a conspiracy. It is an everyday fear for some countries.
Theodosia Hadjithekli Lives
Also exploring a contemporary political issue is Theodosia Hadjithekli (Painting and Printmaking) – Livesexplores the reality of the refugee situation on Lesvos. Her installations features a number of pieces including an arresting photorealistic painting of the "Lifejacket graveyard" - the field where all the lifejackets collected from refugees who arrive on the island are gathered. People who are desperate to escape war, pile their dreams in a landscape which is so sobering to walk through. Each vest represents a person, a soul, an individual pressed forward by fear and clinging to hope. Most survived the journey, many didn’t. The artwork is a shout out to the world for help to all those who are fighting for a better future. It is a stark portrait of the many refugees who crossed the Aegean Sea and a massive reminder of the resilience of the human spirit that stretches to the horizon.
Jack Morgan
Vivienne Kelly Wing River (segment)
Elsewhere in Painting and Printmaking Emma Hallstakes a post feminist look at objectification of women; Jack Morgan presents a body of work looking at the collision of two worlds: the current political climate concerning 'alternative facts' that we find ourselves living in, and the forever present lexicon of the advertising world, often described as 'artificial truth and Vivienne Kelly presents Wing River, an installation of taxidermy and pigeon wings. A train of pigeon feathers flows across the floor, stuffed Glasgow pigeons are hung in the space and behind them all is an etched map showing the places that the dead pigeons had been found.
Paisley Diamond's large-scale maneki-neko
In Corporate FunRobbie Campbell (Fine Art photography) presents an installation of a galvanised steel climbing frame, florescent tube light, screen print on aluminium, screen print on polyester, screen print on pvc coated table cloth. Fellow Fine Art Photography student Paisley Diamond has installed a large-scale representation of the lucky charm the maneki-neko (beckoning cat). Visitors are invited to sit inside the cat.
Through her work The grass is greener where you water it Anne Mie Bak Andersen (Fine Art photography) asks the viewer to consider how we all need to work together to make sure that we stay organic and do not turn the world into a plastic planet through hyper-consumerism. Anne Mie’s sustainable practice sees her recycling, reusing and reducing making projects with materials that have been disregarded. The grass may be greener on the other side, but we need to make sure that we take care to water our own grass too.
The MFA Degree Show, featuring work by the latest cohort of students on the programme that has produced no fewer than four Turner Prize winners in recent years and one of this year’s nominees, will once again be shown in the Glue Factory.
The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2017 has been sponsored by Tilney Group.
"I am delighted that we at Tilney are the headline sponsor of The Glasgow School of Art's undergraduate degree show,” says Paul Frame, Head of Investment Management, Scotland at the Tilney Group. “The final work from the students is nothing short of outstanding and is a culmination of their natural talent and the many years of hard graft that they have put in over their study. I would strongly recommend a visit to the show, as only when in the company of the students does their work really come alive.”
"Tilney is a long standing supporter of The Glasgow School of Art, our links to this renowned institution span many years, personally I have pleasure in chairing the ambassadors committee at GSA in support of the Mackintosh Campus Appeal,” he adds. “For me, every visit to the GSA, even in such challenging times after the fire, lifts the spirit."
The MFA is sponsored by citizen for the 4th consecutive year.
"citizenM is delighted to be supporting the MFA Degree Show at The Glasgow School of Art for the fourth year. We have a strong affiliation with contemporary art, with originally and specially commissioned pieces throughout all the hotels," says Robin Chadha, Chief Marketing Officer. "The GSA is recognised worldwide as a leading creative school for the arts, and as firm believers in helping new talent, we are particularly pleased to support the GSA MFA students graduating this year."
Degree Show runs in the Bourdon and Reid Buildings, Renfrew Street, G3 6RQ and Tontine Building, 20 Trongate, G1 5NA from 10 – 17 June. Open Monday – Friday 10am – 9pm, Saturday/Sunday 10am – 5pm. Entry Free.
MFA is at the Glue Factory, 15 Burns Street G4 9SE, from 9 – 18 June. Open Thursday – Sunday 11am – 6pm. Entry free
Ends
Further information
Lesley Booth
07799414474
@GSofAMedia
