Camberwell Degree Show BA Fine Art - 2008

Getting to Camberwell was bad enough – but finding my way around the show was a nightmare as the Fine Art work is distributed over five different floors in all three of the blocks on this site and even armed with a map I can’t be entirely sure I covered it all. The first piece of work however was easy enough to find as it was sitting on the pavement outside. It was a cross between a giant hamster wheel and a tricycle rickshaw! Inside the reception area there were photos and a video documenting the piece by Francis Thorburn on a live road trial. The power was provided by boys, attired only in trunks, being the hamsters. This must have turned a lot of heads during the performance, I was enthralled with just the video!

Somewhere upstairs, there is a large room with lots more sculpture, including other ambitious constructions (an undulating hinged floor and a pipe organ among others) but the labelling lets the work down as it’s hard to see who the artist is. There is serious making here albeit a bit dated in some instances.

A brilliantly amusing installation by Rebecca Liddert is her schizophrenic wardrobe. Initially you see an immaculate arrangement of clothes and shoes (with everything colour sorted) beloved of glossy magazine picture editors, but seen from behind it is total disorder! Not only are the items higgledy-piggledy but there are all sorts of inappropriate items of junk too. Another highlight for me is a plaster floor piece by Shanie Mor which looks like it’s inspired by ‘arts and crafts’ floor tiles. Some of the pieces in this mosaic are 3D instead of 2D turning the outsized floor into a Lilliputian city. In a reverse move, Mark Worrall’s obsessive, giant doodle drawing on a wall cleverly curves into the shape of a nautilus.

Abigail Box’s paintings have something of graffiti about them, partly because of the fluorescent colours used but also because of the architectural details and stencil style she uses. The strongest is titled “Brave New World” which surreally has bears in an urban environment. I was less impressed with most of the rest of the painting with the exception of a colour installation by Nina Rodan, or is it 923 paintings? She has hung those little old fashioned white card price tags on a wall, but each one could be seen as a miniature painting. From a distance the pattern that the colour blobs make looks like a representation of a world map from the statistical section of the atlas.

As always, when I’m at a large show it is difficult to get the gist of any film or video piece as the time the work demands is almost always greater than the time available… However I didn’t need long to see enough of the controversial work by Paulo Pereira where a tattooed man alternated between caressing a TV and his own bum while curled up in an almost foetal position. I’m sure that it’s a very serious work but definitely not for the feint hearted.