Byam Shaw Degree Show BA Fine Art - 2008

Byam Shaw say that being a small art school is a strength but also that being part of Central St Martins is good, creating wider opportunities for students and staff at all levels. The fact that I, and quite a few others, had turned up to see the BA show before the PV does make you wonder however whether the size of ‘The University of the Arts London’ is a problem on the communications front! However, whether because of, or despite this ‘date problem’ the reception I received was the friendliest of any art school I have visited, with helpful orientation from staff and students.
The work on show is strong overall, with the painting being particularly ambitious. Examples of this are the huge boards that both Lisa Muten (whose paintings support each other in the centre of her space) and Thomas Gillespie use in their work and the ‘walk in’ painting installation of Richard Milward. Gillespie’s multi panel works (one piece is eight by sixteen feet) and his watery technique are well suited to the large, bleak architectural spaces that he paints. I was also impressed with the serious woodworking on display from Luke Newton with his drawing machine and Rebecca Harrison with her highly disturbing restraint chairs, which seemed to be eerily Daddy, Mummy and child sized.

Kylie Marie McManus has created an interesting project where she places small metal plaques around London. Most of them rusted, and five disappeared but she collected up the rest and displayed them in a museum cabinet with documentation of the project in a book, my favourite is #27 “A woman passed by”. Another London based work consists of posters of famous landmarks with the tag line “Welcome to London” however in the foreground are the less salubrious spaces of the capital like seedy underpasses where attacks and rapes take place illustrating a disturbing flip side to the tourist attractions.

I have a Geology degree and a background in computing so it is inevitable that I should be attracted to John Tapsfield’s Data Mining installation with his process flow diagrams and the museum style model. It is a very tongue in cheek but interesting critique on these insidious practices of modern corporations.

It was interesting to be introduced to the rising star of the college – Richard Milward. Perhaps surprisingly he is a name in the world of literature not music (or art even), as the author of Apples, a novel he wrote at nineteen about teenagers from the poorer estates of Middlesborough. I found the following in a review of the Faber & Faber novel on the Times Online site “…what it conveys so compellingly is the amorality of adolescence, the lawlessness-cum-schizophrenia that allows one to be half-naive, half-knowing, sensitive and callous, endearing and repulsive all at the same time.” His painting installation is titled “Back Garden of Earthly Delights” after Hieronymus Bosch, who’s Garden of Earthly Delights depicts the creation of earth and the pleasure-seeking world that follows the infiltration of sin in the Genesis story has some parallels with his writing but apparently he is now going to put down the brushes in favour of the keyboard, probably a good financial decision!