The degree show presented a number of jaw-dropping rooms with artworks displayed across campus, in the Hatton Gallery, the larger King Edward VII building and the Boiler House. In a show of nearly seventy soon-to-graduate artists, more than a few were driven to create work that expressed discomfort and unease with the limitations on identity imposed by societal structures, with childhood memory and the institution of the family being a recurring theme. This generation of artists seem to be asking what they can do to push back against the old institutions and to challenge the roles that others assign them. As well as exploring family, relationships and control, for a show by young artists there was also a surprising number of references to grannies, which was an unexpected thread of connection!
Some artists channelled a confessional tone, such as Nesh Dadgostar’s typed-up letters expressing separation from family, the emotional experience of cultural difference, and candid reflections like ‘I should call my grandma more’. His film ‘Moshtagh’ features interviews with the Iranian diaspora to further explore the liminality of cultural dysmorphia and what it feels like to live in a community with pressures to conform to different customs. Molly Callon creates a pseudo-Catholic confession corner, her repeated icons of bunnies and teddies hinting at a link between nostalgia, creature comforts and religion.
Another video using interviewing and recollections of family life, but combined with adolescent diary entries, was Seren Hamer’s screen installation ‘Say You Love Me, Say You Do’. Magnified handwritten diary entries are accompanied by a voice that laments the loss of family connection: ‘She still couldn’t believe how her mum couldn’t reach out to her daughter on her birthday’. Grace Hunt’s videos use retro family footage of young children opening birthday presents and combine it with an audio interview with a parent revealing their anxieties stemming from the ‘pressure to get it right’ and beliefs like ‘it’s so much easier now’.
These ruminations on the ongoing impact of family dynamics and art as a conduit for emotional reconciliation continued with Annabel Peters’ wall-hung sculptures using strings of black dots to spell out concerns such as: ‘I don’t want you to worry’, ‘Are you proud of me?’ and ‘I’m scared about next year and the future’. Her huge bead-maze sculpture also riffs on how childhood experiences can become magnified with time. A series of blocks spelling out ‘It’s ok, I’ll always love you’ are strung onto metal loops which (theoretically) are able to be moved from one side to the other, navigating its complex twists and turns. Whilst some of the artists opt for bare-it-all honesty, others adopt a stance that guards against emotional vulnerability, like Emily Davis’ painting Boston Kids showing children joylessly eating ice-cream, their eyes cast in shadow denying attempts to speculate on their inner-thoughts. Similarly, there’s no nostalgia or reassurance to be found in Melanie Victoria Colbey’s flimsy and un-child-friendly metal sculptures of a swing, rocking-horse and cot.
Not all family history and sentiment towards it can be expressed with such straightforwardness. A silent film from Ksenija Cvetkova looks at the politics of absence and how a lack of information doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen. A written narrative interspersed with images of dilapidated buildings, some revealed to be former Socialist housing in Vilnius, Lithuania, asks ‘What do you see?’ The next caption answers, ‘Home’. Later on, another statement appears, ‘An absence of a story is a story’, followed by a recollection of childhood curiosity: ‘Remembering mother’s gift for storytelling and sitting at the kitchen table, in different homes, through different years… always spooked by the greedy impatient question, “Could you tell me more?”’.
Gaynor Voice’s focus on memory is based on what happens when your recounting of events doesn’t tally up with others’ (a guaranteed and unavoidable quality of memory, but one that causes stress and isolation nonetheless). Her dispersed collages on wood incorporating family photographs are etched with maxims like ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily remembrance of how things were’ and the more accusatory, ‘As we know, she has a way of remembering things that are not a complete truth’. If memory is positioned as more credible if it conforms to the exactness of others’ re-telling, then Hebe Wallington develops a critical aesthetic from a dyslexic perspective in their work riffing on former school reports about the quality of their work.
Keira Beth Wilson’s black and white installation took a more fantastical turn with hypnotic whirling lollies and cartoonish eyes peering from the darkness. A TV set at the centre displays a stop-motion animation. On the screen, we see a granny with eyes wide in shock and a superimposed gasping mouth. There are unsettling creaks in the audio while a storyteller relays a tale on loop: ‘There you’ll find a gran, one of a kind sitting in the night… Onto the bed, where dreams stir in their head… transporting them to a world not so nice’.
Some artists were drawn to exploring control, a sense of being trapped or being told what you can’t do. On the religious policing of queerness, Samuel Shams’ majlis corner sofa included stitched fabric signs that demand no hand-holding, no protesting and no reading, next to a bookshelf with texts such as Homosexuality in Islam, Desiring Arabs and How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America. He countered the rules of this space with a rug positioned behind the sofa reading ‘I claim this space as a place of love, freedom and acceptance’. Olivia Hall’s gripping direct-to-camera video monologue also explored religion and restriction, but focused on the story of a former prisoner who was released from death row. In ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, a reference to the biblical epic film and novel, Hall voices a character who describes transcending their prison cell by sending locks of their hair around the world to people who will set it free into the oceans. They are commanding and authoritative, at times literally directing her what to do, and she does. At one point, she describes the prisoner saying to her, ‘You should think about using my words in your exhibition’.
Aida Varela Berga’s paintings of a cold tiled bathroom and a not-so-homely bed surrounded by streams of consciousness scrawled on the walls similarly communicate a feeling of imprisonment. One of her paintings appears to count the days trapped in these rooms, a series of tally marks scratched roughly into a brown earthy wall. In another room, Katherine Hunter’s grotesquely humongous (and literal) fly-on-the-wall was an incessant observer, not-so-surreptitiously watching everything and everyone.
Articulating queer defiance against the pressure to conform to others’ norms was Marko Ingram’s photorealistic trio of paintings. Titled ‘Saint Sebastian Altarpiece’, a figure in a Roman toga and a hooded person reminiscent of Death stand either side a decidedly contemporary portrait of a person in grunge-Gothic attire. Given that Saint Sebastian was persecuted for his beliefs, this reference suggests the use of contemporary portraiture as a means of shining a light on modern day struggles over freedom of expression and identity.
Another reference to sainthood is Hannah Goodall’s ‘Home Sick’ in which a figure poses as Agatha of Sicily (c.231-251 AD), patron saint of breast cancer, wet nurses and those who have been raped. In a large photograph, she displays a platter of Minne di Sant’Agata, a type of pastry eaten in Sicily on 5 February in her memory. This is part of an installation with a long dining table and letters to patients who have undergone medical screening.
Another major theme in the show is the body and materiality, and how we are embedded in different environmental conditions. Beth Willoughby’s weavings using stems of flowers and grasses have an understated beauty, the gradual drooping and decay of the blossoms and buds shifting this work into time-based media. Anna Mud’s ‘Moral Fibre’ is perhaps one of the only works in the show that directly addresses class and substandard living conditions with its fabulously convincing depiction of black mould using dark velvet fibres on wall-to-ceiling white organza fabric.
Rachel Herriott’s audio-visual work uses shaky camera footage of tumbling ocean waves and swaying cherry blossom branches, all to be watched from a rocking chair to emulate the wind’s ability to sweep us along. The camera does not conceal human presence in this mode of filming. Also creating an indivisible link between the body and the environment, Freddy Williams digs up spoil (waste from the mining industry) from Lynemouth’s former colliery to create a vertical wall-based work ‘Anthropocene I’, beneath it lying a mound of dirt-ridden clothes worn by manual labourers.
Developing their technique of ‘body mind mapping’, Kub Bradley starts by taking large swathes of canvas outdoors and making rubbings directly from elements in the landscape. Feathery and almost floral plumes of fiery orange, fuchsia, bright blue and yellows make their work sing with a colourful expressivity rooted in their body’s interaction with land. Looking at materiality and the body within consumerism, Manako Maddison’s ‘We Are What We (Wear) Consume 92mt’ – gigantic shirt-like spectres made from plastic bags and packaging – and Cecilia Sargent’s paper reproductions of designer bags both critique the ethics of fashion.
Also exploring forms of clothing and/or representational sculpture of the body were Thulsi Mathes Hewage, Megan Nolan, Madeleine Lewis, Phoebe Scott and Daniella Woolvett. Hewage used her late grandmother’s shimmering sarees to create ‘expanded paintings’, using the intricate silken fabric to create flows and ruches across bright yellow monochrome canvases. One alluded to the figure of a snake shedding its skin, perhaps another reference to the hold that family has over identity.
An approach to performed femininity was Megan Nolan’s 2D cut-outs of a dancer’s legs, one posed above a stage with a backdrop of oppressive chains and another provocatively raised above a horizontal board leaving a hole surrounded by draped pink fabric. It felt like the flatness communicated with these sculptures had a big role in portraying objectification and the emptiness of performed gender. Madeleine Lewis’ dramatic staging of two decadent gowns atop a crimson red platform brings a sense of theatre to the show. The red gown lies crumpled on a throne-like chair as if a soul has left its body and risen in the form of the white gown, which is embroidered with deep-red leafless branches and the shape of a baby on its chest. Meriel Morris-McHarry’s billowing sheet of stitched-together shirts and sculptures that look like oversized ties fanning out across the floor seem to question lifestyles dedicated to office work and the service industry. A small, embroidered quote from Terry Pratchett’s book Reaper Man (1991) reads: ‘no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world finally die away’, maybe asking us to reflect on the consequences of what we spend our time doing.
Opting for rigid and brittle materials to explore decoration (or confinement) of the body, Phoebe Scott hangs a deconstructed human form created with colourful stained-glass casts of a female torso and knee-high heeled boots. The stained-glass places women’s bodies in dialogue with the sacred whereas the trinkets and bric-a-brac she incorporates (heads of Barbie, My Little Pony, Tamagotchis, clock faces, buttons and pearl earrings) points to how consumerism influences expressions of gender from childhood. Daniella Woolvett creates a terrifyingly sharp cage-like corseted dress which you wouldn’t dare to move in.
I was mesmerised by Gavin Gayagoy’s atmospheric video work using photogrammetry which was one of the stand-out works of the degree show for me. A tower block rhythmically repeats across the screen before cutting to a cross-section showing people captured (trapped?) by digital imaging processes. In his work, the collectively lived-in buildings communicate a palpable sense of isolation, stasis and being suspended in time.
This was paired with Frey Bowerman’s work which made clever use of light to expand the canvas. Spotlights illuminate a series of colourful drawings depicting dream-like animals, part-flesh, part-skeletal: crows pierced by swords, a dog caught on barbed wire as three children stand in the woods holding a dagger and scythe on the precipice of discovering a world of violence and death. The spotlights reveal the blood-red walls behind and yet the mounted canvases remain somewhat sanitised, a separation of image and reality, here and there.
Developing a more Cyborgian approach, Alasdair Cook’s impressive paintings featuring part-flesh, part-mechanical bodies seem to focus on how the meatspace meets computation. Foetuses, eyeballs, brains and bottles of milk are integrated into complex robotic constructions with references to a life lived through digital mediation; cashless payment mechanisms and scenes of animals viewed via iPad screens.
In a show with next-to-zero interactive art, Jakub Stadnik’s installation stood out as a space for collective participation. With a huge brain suspended high above the space encasing a computer screen and a wall of messy flowing wires and cables, the space for hands-on creativity seemed to strongly position imagination as a collective act as well as challenge any individualist tendencies of the brain-as-computer metaphor.
In such a mammoth show, the artists tackled complex topics like control and struggles for self-determination with nuance. However, the artists’ confrontations with power were not limited to the display of works in the exhibition. In solidarity with the national culture sector strike for Palestine and in support of the nearby Peace Encampment, the students closed the show for one day, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. This was met with an unnecessary and aggressively amped-up security presence and intimidation which included ripping down of posters and derogatory language towards the students. The following day, Saturday 1 June, the university closed the degree show to the public without student consultation.
The fallibility of memory was raised numerous times throughout the exhibition but I think I can say with certainty, I’ll remember this end-of-year show.
Kin is an artist, writer and PhD researcher based in Newcastle.
Newcastle at Hatton Gallery, King Edward VII Building and The Boiler House from 25 May to 7 June 2024
London at The Truman Brewery from 21 – 23 June 2024
This article is supported by Newcastle University.
Published 05.08.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
2,428 words
